Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy

BT THE SAME AUTHOR

HERETICS. (Cloth. 12 mo.)

A COMPANION VOLUME TO “ ORTHODOXY ”

THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING
HILL. (Cloth. 12MO.)

ORTHODOXY

BY

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

MCMIX

Copyright, 1908, by John Lane Company

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S^i.

TO MY MOTHER

PREFACE

r

THIS book is meant to be a companion
to “Heretics,” and to put the posi¬
tive side in addition to the negative.
Many critics complained of the book
called “Heretics” because it merely criticised
current philosophies without offering any alter¬
native philosophy. This book is an attempt
to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably
affirmative and therefore unavoidably auto¬
biographical. The writer has been driven
back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that
which beset Newman in writing his Apologia;
he has been forced to be egotistical only in
order to be sincere. While everything else
may be different the motive in both cases is
the same. It is the purpose of the writer to
attempt an explanation, not of whether the
Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he
personally has come to believe it. The book
is therefore arranged upon the positive prin¬
ciple of a riddle and its answer. It deals first

vii

Preface

with all the writer’s own solitary and sincere
speculations and then with all the startling style
in which they were all suddenly satisfied by
the Christian Theology. The writer regards it
as amounting to a convincing creed. But if
it is not that it is at least a repeated and sur¬
prising coincidence.

Gilbert K. Chesterton.

\

CONTENTS

r

Chapter Page

' I. Introduction in Defence of Every¬
thing Else . 13

II. The Maniac . 22

, III. The Suicide of Thought ... 52

IV. The Ethics of Elfland ... 81

V. The Flag of the World . . . 119

VI. The Paradoxes of Christianity . 148

VII. The Eternal Revolution . . . 188

VIII. The Romance of Orthodoxy . . 230

IX. Authority and the Adventurer . 261

IX

Orthodoxy

ORTHODOXr

I — Introduction in Defence of Everything
Else

THE only possible excuse for this book
is that it is an answer to a challenge.
Even a bad shot is dignified when
he accepts a duel. When some time
ago I published a series of hasty but sincere
papers, under the name of “Heretics,” several
critics for whose intellect I have a warm respect
(I may mention specially Mr. G. S. Street) said
that it was all very well for me to tell everybody
to affirm his cosmic theory, but that I had care¬
fully avoided supporting my precepts with ex¬
ample. “ I will begin to worry about my philo¬
sophy,” said Mr. Street, “when Mr. Chesterton
has given us his.” It was perhaps an incau¬
tious suggestion to make to a person only too
ready to write books upon the feeblest provoca¬
tion. But after all, though Mr. Street has in¬
spired and created this book, he need not read
it. If he does read it, he will find that in its
pages I have attempted in a vague and personal
way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in
a series of deductions, to state the philosophy

13

Orthodoxy

in which I have come to believe. I will not
call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.
God and humanity made it; and it made me.

I have often had a fancy for writing a ro¬
mance about an English yachtsman who slightly
miscalculated his course and discovered Eng¬
land under the impression that it was a new
island in the South Seas. I always find, how¬
ever, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
write this fine work, so I may as well give it
away for the purposes of philosophical illus¬
tration. There will probably be a general im¬
pression that the man who landed (armed to
the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the
British flag on that barbaric temple which
turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt
rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny
that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that
he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of
folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then
you have not studied with sufficient delicacy
the rich romantic nature of the hero of this
tale. His mistake was really a most enviable
mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I
take him for. What could be. more delightful
than to have in the same few minutes all the
fascinating terrors of going abroad combined
with all the humane security of coming home

14

In Def ence of Everything Else

again ? What could be better than to have all
the fun of discovering South Africa without the
disgusting necessity of landing there? What
could be more glorious than to brace one’s self
up to discover New South Wales and then
realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was
really old South Wales. This at least seems to
me the main problem for philosophers, and is
in a manner the main problem of this book.
How can we contrive to be at once astonished
at the world and yet at home in it? How can
this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged
citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps,
how can this world give us at once the fascina¬
tion of a strange town and the comfort and
honour of being our own town ?

To show that a faith or a philosophy is true
from every standpoint would be too big an
undertaking even for a much bigger book than
this; it is necessary to follow one path of argu¬
ment; and this is the path that I here propose
to follow. I wish to set forth my faith as par¬
ticularly answering this double spiritual need,
the need for that mixture of the familiar and
the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly
named romance. For the very word “ro¬
mance” has in it the mystery and ancient
meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dis-

15

Orthodoxy

pute anything ought always to begin by saying
what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what
he proposes to prove he should always state
what he does not propose to prove. The thing
I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose
to take as common ground between myself and
any average reader, is this desirability of an
active and imaginative life, picturesque and full
of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western
man at any rate always seems to have desired.
If a man says that extinction is better than
existence or blank existence better than variety
and adventure, then he is not one of the ordi¬
nary people to whom I am talking. If a man
prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But
nearly all people I have ever met in this western
society in which I live would agree to the general
proposition that we need this life of practical
romance; the combination of something that is
strange with something that is secure. We
need so to view the world as to combine an idea
of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need
to be happy in this wonderland without once
being merely comfortable. It is this achieve¬
ment of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in
these pages.

But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning
the man in a yacht, who discovered England.

16

In D efence of Everything Else

For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered
England. I do not see how this book can
avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see
(to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull.
Dulness will, however, free me from the charge
which I most lament; the charge of being flip¬
pant. Mere light sophistry is the thing that I
happen to despise most of all things, and it is
perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing
of which I am generally accused. I know
nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a
mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If
it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard
Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a
mere common millionaire; for a man of his
mental activity could invent a sophistry every
six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it
is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr.
Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he
cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the
truth. I find myself under the same intoler¬
able bondage. I never in my life said any¬
thing merely because I thought it funny; though
of course, I have had ordinary human vain¬
glory, and may have thought it funny because
I had said it. It is one thing to describe an
interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature
who does not exist. It is another thing to dis-

i7

Orthodoxy

cover that the rhinoceros does exist and then
take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he
didn’t. One searches for truth, but it may be
that one pursues instinctively the more extraor¬
dinary truths. And I offer this book with the
heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who
hate what I write, and regard it (very justly,
for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a
single tiresome joke.

For if this book is a joke it is a joke against
me. I am the man who with the utmost daring
discovered what had been discovered before.
If there is an element of farce in what follows,
the farce is at my own expense; for this book
explains how I fancied I was the first to set
foot in Brighton and then found I was the last.
It recounts my elephantine adventures in pur¬
suit of the obvious. No one can think my case
more ludicrous than I think it myself ; no reader
can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of
him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel
shall hurl me from my throne. I freely con¬
fess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the
nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn
little boys, try to be in advance of the age.
Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in
advance of the truth. And I found that I was
eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain

18

In Defence of Everything Else

my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration
in uttering my truths. And I was punished in
the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my
truths: but I have discovered, not that they were
not truths, but simply that they were not mine.
When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up
by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven for¬
give me, that I did try to be original; but I only
succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior
copy of the existing traditions of civilized re¬
ligion. The man from the yacht thought he
was the first to find England; I thought
I was the first to find Europe. I did try to
found a heresy of my own; and when I had
put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
was orthodoxy.

It may be that somebody will be entertained
by the account of this happy fiasco. It might
amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I
gradually learnt from the truth of some stray
legend or from the falsehood of some dominant
philosophy, things that I might have learnt
from my catechism — if I had ever learnt it.
There may or may not be some entertainment
in reading how I found at last in an anarchist
club or a Babylonian temple what I might have !
found in the nearest parish church. If any one

19

Orthodoxy

is entertained by learning how the flowers of
the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the acci¬
dents of politics or the pains of youth came to¬
gether in a certain order to produce a certain
conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may pos¬
sibly read this book. But there is in every¬
thing a reasonable division of labour. I have
written the book, and nothing on earth would
induce me to read it.

I add one purely pedantic note which comes,
as a note naturally should, at the beginning of
the book. These essays are concerned only to
discuss the actual fact that the central Chris¬
tian theology (sufficiently summarized in the
Apostles’ Creed) is the best root of energy and
sound ethics. They are not intended to dis¬
cuss the very fascinating but quite different
question of what is the present seat of authority
for the proclamation of that creed. When the
word “orthodoxy” is used here it means the
Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody
calling himself Christian until a very short time
ago and the general historic conduct of those
who held such a creed. I have been forced by
mere space to confine myself to what I have
got from this creed; I do not touch the matter
much disputed among modem Christians, of
where we ourselves got it. This is not an eccle-

20

In D efence of Everything Else

siastical ^treatise but a sort of slovenly auto¬
biography. But if any one wants my opinions
about the actual nature of the authority, Mr.
G. S. Street has only to throw me another chal¬
lenge, and I will write him another book.

21

II — The Maniac

THOROUGHLY worldly people never
understand even the world; they rely
altogether on a few cynical maxims
which are not true. Once I remem¬
ber walking with a prosperous publisher, who
made a remark which I had often heard before ;
it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modem
world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and
I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.
The publisher said of somebody, “That man
will get on; he believes in himself.” And I
remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my
eye caught an omnibus on which was written
“Hanwell.” I said to him, “Shall I tt^Kou
where the men are who believe most inffflfm-
selves? For I can tell you. I know of men
who believe in themselves more colossally than
Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the
fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide
you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men
who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic
asylums.” He said mildly that there were a
good many men after all who believed in them¬
selves and who were not in lunatic asylums.

22

The Maniac

“Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all
men ought to know them. That drunken poet
from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy,
he believed in himself. That elderly minister
with an epic from whom you were hiding in a
back room, he believed in himself. If you
consulted your business experience instead of
your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would
know that believing in himself is one of the
commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t
act believe in themselves; and debtors who
won’t pay. It would be much truer to say
that a man will certainly fail, because he be¬
lieves in himself. Complete self-confidence is
not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a
weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a
hysterical and superstitious belief like believing
in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has
‘ Han well ’ written on his face as plain as it is
written on that omnibus.” And to all this my
friend the publisher made this very deep and
effective reply, “Well, if a man is not to believe
in himself, in what is he to believe?” After a
long pause I replied, “I will go home and write
a book in answer to that question.” This is
the book that I have written in answer to it.

But I think this book may well start where
our argument started — in the neighbourhood

23

Orthodoxy

of the mad-house. Modern masters of science
are much impressed with the need of beginning
all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters
of religion were quite equally impressed with
that necessity. They began with the fact of
sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether
or no man could be washed in miraculous
waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he
wanted washing. But certain religious leaders
in London, not mere materialists, have begun
in our day not to deny the highly disputable
water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Cer¬
tain new theologians dispute original sin, which
is the only part of Christian theology which can
really be proved. Some followers of the Rev¬
erend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fas¬
tidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness,
which they cannot see even in their dreams.
But they essentially deny human sin, which
they can see in the street. The strongest saints
and the strongest sceptics alike took positive
evil as the starting-point of their argument. If
it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel
exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the
religious philosopher can only draw one of two
deductions. He must either deny the existence
of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the
present union between God and man, as all

The Maniac

Christians do. The new theologians seem to
think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny
the cat.

In this remarkable situation it is plainly not
now possible (with any hope of a universal
appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the
fact of sin. This very fact which was to them
(and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very
fact that has been specially diluted or denied.
But though moderns deny the existence of sin,
I do not think that they have yet denied the
existence of a lunatic asylum. We all agree
still that there is a collapse of the intellect as
unmistakable as a falling house. Men deny
hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell. For the pur¬
pose of our primary argument the one may
very well stand where the other stood. I mean
that as all thoughts and theories were once
judged by whether they tended to make a man
lose his soul, so for our present purpose all
modern thoughts and theories may be judged
by whether they tend to make a man lose his
wits.

It is true that some speak lightly and loosely
of insanity as in itself attractive. But a mo¬
ment’s thought will show that if disease is beau¬
tiful, it is generally some one else’s disease.
A blind man may be picturesque; but it re-

25

Orthodoxy

quires two eyes to see the picture. And simi¬
larly even the wildest poetry of insanity can
only be enjoyed by the sane. To the insane
man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is
quite true. A man who thinks himself a
chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken.
A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to him¬
self as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homo¬
geneity of his mind which makes him dull, and
which makes him mad. It is only because we
see the irony of his idea that we think him even
amusing; it is only because he does not see the
irony of his idea that he is put in Han well at all.
In short, oddities only strike ordinary people.
Oddities do not strike odd people. This is
why ordinary people have a much more exciting
time; while odd people are always complaining
of the dulness of life. This is also why the new
novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy
tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes
the hero a normal human boy; it is his adven¬
tures that are startling ; they startle him because
he is normal. But in the modern psychological
novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not
central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to
affect him adequately, and the book is mo¬
notonous. You can make a story out of a hero
among dragons; but not out of a dragon among

26

The Maniac

dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane
man will do in a mad world. The sober real¬
istic novel of to-day discusses what an essential
lunatic will do in a dull world.

Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from
this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our
intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance
at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do
in the matter is to blot out one big and common
mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere
that imagination, especially mystical imagina¬
tion, is dangerous to man’s mental balance.
Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologi¬
cally unreliable; and generally there is a vague
association between wreathing laurels in your
hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and his¬
tory utterly contradict this view. Most of the
very great poets have been not only sane, but
extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever
really held horses, it was because he was much
the safest man to hold them. Imagination does
not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed
insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but
chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and
cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I
am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking
logic: I only say that this danger does lie in
logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is

27

Orthodoxy

as wholesome as physical paternity. More¬
over, it is worthy of remark that when a poet
really was morbid it was commonly because he
had some weak spot of rationality on his brain.
Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not be¬
cause he was poetical, but because he was
specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical
for him; he disliked chess because it was full
of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly
preferred the black discs of draughts, because
they were more like the mere black dots on a
diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is
this: that only one great English poet went
mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven
mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of
predestination. Poetry was not the disease,
but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in
health. He could sometimes forget the red
and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessi¬
tarianism dragged him among the wide waters
and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was
damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved
by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men
do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much
madder than poets. Homer is complete and
calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into
extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite him¬
self; it is only some of his critics who have dis-

28

The Maniac

covered that he was somebody else. And
though St. John the Evangelist saw many
strange monsters in his vision, he saw no crea¬
ture so wild as one of his own commentators.
The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane
because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason
seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it
finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like
the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To
accept everything is an exercise, to understand
everything a strain. The poet only desires
exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch
himself in. The poet only asks to get his head
into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks
to get the heavens into his head. And it is his
head that splits.

It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that
this striking mistake is commonly supported
by a striking misquotation. We have all heard
people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as
“Great genius is to madness near allied.” But
Dryden did not say that great genius was to
madness near allied. Dryden was a great
genius himself, and knew better. It would
have been hard to find a man more romantic
than he, or more sensible. What Dryden said
was this, “Great wits are oft to madness near
allied ” ; and that is true. It is the pure promp-

29

Orthodoxy

titude of the intellect that is in peril of a break¬
down. Also people might remember of what
sort of man Dryden was talking. He was not
talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan
or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical
man of the world, a sceptic, a diplomatist, a
great practical politician. Such men are in¬
deed to madness near allied. Their incessant
calculation of their own brains and other
people’s brains is a dangerous trade. It is
always perilous to the mind to reckon up the
mind. A flippant person has asked why we
say, “As mad as a hatter ” A more flippant
person might answer that a hatter is mad be¬
cause he has to measure the human head.

And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it
is equally true that maniacs are commonly
great reasoners. When I was engaged in a
controversy with the Clarion on the matter of
free will, that able writer Mr. R. B. Suthers
said that free will was lunacy, because it meant
causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic
would be causeless. I do not dwell here upon
the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Ob¬
viously if any actions, even a lunatic’s, can be
causeless, determinism is done for. If the
chain of causation can be broken for a mad¬
man, it can be broken for a man. But my pur-

30

The Maniac

pose is to point out something more practical.
It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian
Socialist should not know anything about free
wTill. But it was certainly remarkable that a
modem Marxian Socialist should not know any¬
thing about lunatics. Mr. Suthers evidently
did not know anything about lunatics. The
last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that
his actions are causeless. If any human acts
may loosely be called causeless, they are the
minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he
walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking
his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy
man who does the useless things; the sick man
is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly
such careless and causeless actions that the
madman could never understand; for the mad¬
man (like the determinist) generally sees too
much cause in everything. The madman would
read a conspiratorial significance into those
empty activities. He would think that the lop¬
ping of the grass was an attack on private prop¬
erty. He would think that the kicking of the
heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the
madman could for an instant become careless,
he would become sane. Every one who has
had the misfortune to talk with people in the
heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows

Orthodoxy

that their most sinister quality is a horrible
clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with
another in a map more elaborate than a maze.
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely
probable that you will get the worst of it; for
in many ways his mind moves all the quicker
for not being delayed by the things that go with
good judgment. He is not hampered by a
sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb
certainties of experience. He is the more
logical for losing certain sane affections. In¬
deed, the common phrase for insanity is in this
respect a misleading one. The madman is not
the man who has lost his reason. The madman
is the man who has lost everything except his
reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is
always complete, and often in a purely rational
sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly,
the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at
least unanswerable; this may be observed spe¬
cially in the two or three commonest kinds of
madness. If a man says (for instance) that
men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot
dispute it except by saying that all the men
deny that they are conspirators ; which is exactly
what conspirators would do. His explanation
covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a

33

The Maniac

man says that he is the rightful King of Eng¬
land, it is no complete answer to say that the
existing authorities call him mad ; for if he were
King of England that might be the wisest thing
for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man
says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to
tell him that the world denies his divinity; for
the world denied Christ’s.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt
to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not
find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Per¬
haps the nearest we can get to expressing it is
to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect
but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as
infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite
as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way
the insane explanation is quite as complete as
the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is
quite as round as the world, but it is not the
world. There is such a thing as a narrow
universality; there is such a thing as a small
and cramped eternity; you may see it in many
modern religions. Now, speaking quite exter¬
nally and empirically, we may say that the
strongest and most unmistakable mark of mad¬
ness is this combination between a logical com¬
pleteness and a spiritual contraction. The
lunatic’s theory explains a large number of

33

Orthodoxy

things, but it does not explain them in a large
way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with
a mind that was growing morbid, we should be
chiefly concerned not so much to give it argu¬
ments as to give it air, to convince it that there
was something cleaner and cooler outside the
suffocation of a single argument. Suppose,
for instance, it were the first case that I took
as typical; suppose it were the case of a man
who accused everybody of conspiring against
him. If we could express our deepest feelings
of protest and appeal against this obsession, I
suppose we should say something like this:
“Oh, I admit that you have your case and have
it by heart, and that many things do fit into
other things as you say. I admit that your
explanation explains a great deal; but what a
great deal it leaves out! Are there no other
stories in the world except yours; and are all
men busy with your business? Suppose we
grant the details; perhaps when the man in the
street did not seem to see you it was only his
cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked
you your name it was only because he knew it
already. But how much happier you would
be if you only knew that these people cared
nothing about you! How much larger your
life would be if your self could become smaller

34

The Maniac

in it ; if you could really look at other men with
common curiosity and pleasure; if you could
see them walking as they are in their sunny
selfishness and their virile indifference! You
would begin to be interested in them, because
they were not interested in you. You would
break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in
which your own little plot is always being
played, and you would find yourself under a
freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
Or suppose it were the second case of madness,
that of a man who claims the crown, your im¬
pulse would be to answer, “All right! Perhaps
you know that you are the King of England;
but why do you care? Make one magnificent
effort and you will be a human being and look
down on all the kings of the earth.” Or it
might be the third case, of the madman who
called himself Christ. If we said what we felt,
we should say, “So you are the Creator and
Redeemer of the world : but what a small world
it must be! What a little heaven you must
inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies!
How sad it must be to be God; and an inade¬
quate God! Is there really no life fuller and
no love more marvellous than yours; and is it
really in your small and painful pity that all
flesh must put its faith? How much happier

35

Orthodoxy

you would be, how much more of you there
would be, if the hammer of a higher God could
smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars
like spangles, and leave you in the open, free
like other men to look up as well as down!”

And it must be remembered that the most
purely practical science does take this view of
mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it
like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.
Neither modern science nor ancient religion
believes in complete free thought. Theology
rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blas¬
phemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by
calling them morbid. For example, some relig¬
ious societies discouraged men more or less
from thinking about sex. The new scientific
society definitely discourages men from think¬
ing about death ; it is a fact, but it is considered
a morbid fact. And in dealing with those
whose morbidity has a touch of mania, modern
science cares far less for pure logic than a
dancing Dervish. In these cases it is not
enough that the unhappy man should desire
truth; he must desire health. Nothing can
save him but a blind hunger for normality, like
that of a beast. A man cannot think himself
out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ
of thought that has become diseased, ungov-

36

The Maniac

emable, and, as it were, independent. He can
only be saved by will or faith. The moment
his mere reason moves, it moves in the old
circular rut; he will go round and round his
logical circle, just as a man in a third-class
carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and
round the Inner Circle unless he performs the
voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting
out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole
business here; a door must be shut for ever.
Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every
cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman
is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting
out a devil. And however quietly doctors and
psychologists may go to work in the matter,
their attitude is profoundly intolerant — as in¬
tolerant as Bloody Mary. Their attitude is
really this: that the man must stop thinking,
if he is to go on living. Their counsel is one
of intellectual amputation. If thy head offend
thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to
enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but
to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with
your whole intellect to be cast into hell — or
into Han well.

Such is the madman of experience; he is
commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful
reasoner. Doubtless he could be vanquished

37

Orthodoxy

in mere reason, and the case against him put
logically. But it can be put much more pre¬
cisely in more general and even aesthetic terms.
He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one
idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He
is without healthy hesitation and healthy com¬
plexity. Now, as I explain in the introduction,
I have determined in these early chapters to
give not so much a diagram of a doctrine as
some pictures of a point of view. And I have
described at length my vision of the maniac for
this reason: that just as I am affected by the
maniac, so I am affected by most modern
thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note
that I hear from Hanwell, I hear also from half
the chairs of science and seats of learning to¬
day; and most of the mad doctors are mad
doctors in more senses than one. They all
have exactly that combination we have noted:
the combination of an expansive and exhaustive
reason with a contracted common sense. They
are universal only in the sense that they take
one thin explanation and carry it very far.
But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a
small pattern. They see a chess-board white
on black, and if the universe is paved with it,
it is still white on black. Like the lunatic,
they cannot alter their standpoint; they cannot

38

The Maniac

make a mental effort and suddenly see it black
on white.

Take first the more obvious case of material¬
ism. As an explanation of the world, material¬
ism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just
the quality of the madman’s argument ; we have
at once the sense of it covering everything and
the sense of it leaving everything out. Con¬
template some able and sincere materialist, as,
for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have
exactly this unique sensation. He understands
everything, and everything does not seem
worth understanding. His cosmos may be
complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still
his cosmos is smaller than our world. Some¬
how his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the
madman, seems unconscious of the alien ener¬
gies and the large indifference of the earth; it
is not thinking of the real things of the earth,
of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first
love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so
very large, and the cosmos is so very small.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a
man can hide his head in.

It must be understood that I am not now
discussing the relation of these creeds to truth;
but, for the present, solely their relation to
health. Later in the argument I hope to attack

39

Orthodoxy

the question of objective verity; here I speak
only of a phenomenon of psychology. I do *
not for the present attempt to prove to Haeckel
that materialism is untrue, any more than I
attempted to prove to the man who thought he
was Christ that he was labouring under an
error. I merely remark here on the fact that
both cases have the same kind of completeness
and the same kind of incompleteness. You
can explain a man’s detention at Hanwell by
an indifferent public by saying that it is the
crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not
worthy. The explanation does explain. Sim¬
ilarly you may explain the order in the universe
by saying that all things, even the souls of men,
are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly
unconscious tree — the blind destiny of matter.
The explanation does explain, though not, of
course, so completely as the madman’s. But
the point here is that the normal human mind
not only objects to both, but feels to both the
same objection. Its approximate statement is
that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he
is not much of a god. And, similarly, if the
cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it
is not much of a cosmos. The thing has
shrunk. The deity is less divine than many
men; and (according to Haeckel) the whole of

The Maniac

life is something much more grey, narrow, and
trivial than many separate aspects of it. The
parts seem greater than the whole.

For we must remember that the materialist
philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly
much more limiting than any religion. In one
sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow.
They cannot be broader than themselves. A
Christian is only restricted in the same sense
that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think
Christianity false and continue to be a Chris¬
tian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false
and continue to be an atheist. But as it hap¬
pens, there is a very special sense in which
materialism has more restrictions than spiritual¬
ism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am
not allowed to believe in determinism. I think
Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed
to believe in fairies. But if we examine the
two vetoes we shall see that his is really much
more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian
is quite free to believe that there is a consider¬
able amount of settled order and inevitable
development in the universe. But the material¬
ist is not allowed to admit into his spotless
machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or
miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to
retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be

Orthodoxy

hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits
that the universe is manifold and even miscel¬
laneous, just as a sane man knows that he is
complex. The sane man knows that he has a
touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch
of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the
really sane man knows that he has a touch of
the madman. But the materialist’s world is
quite simple and solid, just as the madman is
quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure
that history has been simply and solely a chain
of causation, just as the interesting person be¬
fore mentioned is quite sure that he is simply
and solely a chicken. Materialists and mad¬
men never have doubts.

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the
mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I
believe in immortality I need not think about it.
But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not
think about it. In the first case the road is
open and I can go as far as I like ; in the second
the road is shut. But the case is even stronger,
and the parallel with madness is yet more
strange. For it was our case against the ex¬
haustive and logical theory of the lunatic that,
right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his
humanity. Now it is the charge, against the
main deductions of the materialist that, right

42

The Maniac

or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity;
I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope,
courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human.
For instance, when materialism leads men to
complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is
quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a
liberating force. It is absurd to say that you
are especially advancing freedom when you
only use free thought to destroy free will. The
determinists come to bind, not to loose. They
may well call their law the “chain” of causa¬
tion. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a
human being. You may use the language of
liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching,
but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable
to it as a whole as the same language when
applied to a man locked up in a mad-house.
You may say, if you like, that the man is free
to think himself a poached egg. But it is
surely a more massive and important fact that
if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat,
drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Sim¬
ilarly you may say, if you like, that the bold
determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in
the reality of the will. But it is a much more
massive and important fact that he is not free
to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge,
to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs,

43

Orthodoxy

to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sin¬
ners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say “thank
you” for the mustard.

In passing from this subject I may note that
there is a queer fallacy to the effect that ma¬
terialistic fatalism is in some way favourable
to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments
or punishments of any kind. This is startlingly
the reverse of the truth. It is quite tenable
that the doctrine of necessity makes no differ¬
ence at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging
and the kind friend exhorting as before. But
obviously if it stops either of them it stops the
kind exhortation. That the sins are inevitable
does not prevent punishment; if it prevents
anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism
is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is cer¬
tain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not
inconsistent with the cruel treatment of crim¬
inals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with
is the generous treatment of criminals ; with any
appeal to their better feelings or encouragement
in their moral struggle. The determinist does
not believe in appealing to the will, but he does
believe in changing the environment. He must
not say to the sinner, “Go and sin no more,”
because the sinner cannot help it. But he can
put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an envi-

44

The Maniac

ronment. Considered as a figure, therefore, the
materialist has the fantastic outline of the
figure of the madman. Both take up a position
at once unanswerable and intolerable.

Of course it is not only of the materialist that
all this is true. The same would apply to the
other extreme of speculative logic. There is a
sceptic far more terrible than he who believes
that everything began in matter. It is possible
to meet the sceptic who believes that everything
began in himself. He doubts not the existence
of angels or devils, but the existence of men
and cows. For him his own friends are a
mythology made up by himself. He created
his own father and his own mother. This
horrible fancy has in it something decidedly
attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of
our day. That publisher who thought that
men would get on if they believed in themselves,
those seekers after the Superman who are al¬
ways looking for him in the looking-glass, those
writers who talk about impressing their per¬
sonalities instead of creating life for the world,
all these people have really only an inch be¬
tween them and this awful emptiness. Then
when this kindly world all round the man has
been blackened out like a lie; when friends
fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the

45

Orthodoxy

world fail; then when the man, believing in
nothing and in no man, is alone in his own
nightmare, then the great individualistic motto
shall be written over him in avenging irony.
The stars will be only dots in the blackness of
his own brain; his mother’s face will be only a
sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls
of his cell. But over his cell shall be written,
with dreadful truth, “He believes in himself.”

All that concerns us here, however, is to note
that this panegoistic extreme of thought ex¬
hibits the same paradox as the other extreme
of materialism. It is equally complete in
theory and equally crippling in practice. For
the sake of simplicity, it is easier to state the
notion by saying that a man can believe that
he is always in a dream. Now, obviously there
can be no positive proof given to him that he is
not in a dream, for the simple reason that no
proof can be offered that might not be offered
in a dream. But if the man began to burn
down London and say that his housekeeper
would soon call him to breakfast, we should
take him and put him with other logicians in a
place which has often been alluded to in the
course of this chapter. The man who cannot
believe his senses, and the man who cannot
believe anything else, are both insane, but

46

The Maniac

their insanity is proved not by any error in their
argument, but by the manifest mistake of their
whole lives. They have both locked them¬
selves up in two boxes, painted inside with the
sun and stars; they are both unable to get out,
the one into the health and happiness of heaven,
the other even into the health and happiness
of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable ;
nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just
as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But
there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base
and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice
that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or
mystics, have taken as their sign a certain
eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of
this ultimate nullity. When they wish to repre¬
sent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with
his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sar¬
casm in the image of that very unsatisfactory
meal. The eternity of the material fatalists,
the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eter¬
nity of the supercilious theosophists and higher
scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented
by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal
who destroys even himself.

This chapter is purely practical and is con¬
cerned with what actually is the chief mark and
element of insanity; we may say in summary

47

Orthodoxy

that it is reason used without root, reason
in the void. The man who begins to think
without the proper first principles goes mad;
he begins to think at the wrong end. And
for the rest of these pages we have to try and
discover what is the right end. But we may
ask in conclusion, if this be what drives men
mad, what is it that keeps them sane? By
the end of this book I hope to give a definite,
some will think a far too definite, answer. But
for the moment it is possible in the same solely
practical manner to give a general answer touch¬
ing what in actual human history keeps men
sane. Mysticism keeps men sane. As long
as you have mystery you have health; when you
destroy mystery you create morbidity. The
ordinary man has always been sane because
the ordinary man has always been a mystic.
He has permitted the twilight. He has always
had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.
He has always left himself free to doubt his
gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free
also to believe in them. He has always cared
more for truth than for consistency. If he saw
two truths that seemed to contradict each other,
he would take the two truths and the contra¬
diction along with them. His spiritual sight
is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees

48

The Maniac

two different pictures at once and yet sees all
the better for that. Thus he has always be¬
lieved that there was such a thing as fate, but
such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed
that children were indeed the kingdom of
heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient
to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth
because it was young and age because it was
not. It is exactly this balance of apparent
contradictions that has been the whole buoy¬
ancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of
mysticism is this: that man can understand
everything by the help of what he does not
understand. The morbid logician seeks to
make everything lucid, and succeeds in making
everything mysterious. The mystic allows one
thing to be mysterious, and everything else
becomes lucid. The determinist makes the
theory of causation quite clear, and then finds
that he cannot say “if you please” to the house¬
maid. The Christian permits free will to re¬
main a sacred mystery; but because of this his
relations with the housemaid become of a
sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the
seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it
branches forth in all directions with abounding
natural health. As we have taken the circle
as the symbol of reason and madness, we may

49

Orthodoxy

very well take the cross as the symbol at once
of mystery and of health. Buddhism is cen¬
tripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks
out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its
nature ; but it is fixed for ever in its size ; it can
never be larger or smaller. But the cross,
though it has at its heart a collision and a con¬
tradiction, can extend its four arms for ever
without altering its shape. Because it has a
paradox in its centre it can grow without chang¬
ing. The circle returns upon itself and is
bound. The cross opens its arms to the four
winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in
speaking of this deep matter; and another sym¬
bol from physical nature will express sufficiently
well the real place of mysticism before man¬
kind. The one created thing which we cannot
look at is the one thing in the light of which
we look at everything. Like the sun at noon¬
day, mysticism explains everything else by the
blaze of its own victorious invisibility. De¬
tached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a
popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light
without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected
from a dead world. But the Greeks were
right when they made Apollo the god both of
imagination and of sanity; for he was both the

5°

The Maniac

patron of poetry and the patron of healing.
Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I
shall speak later. But that transcendentalism
by which all men live has primarily much the
position of the sun in the sky. We are con¬
scious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion;
it is something both shining and shapeless, at
once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the
moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recur¬
rent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a
blackboard. For the moon is utterly reason¬
able; and the moon is the mother of lunatics
and has given to them all her name.

Ill — The Suicide of Thought

THE phrases of the street are not only
forcible but subtle: for a figure of
speech can often get into a crack too
small for a definition. Phrases like
“put out” or “off colour” might have been
coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of
verbal precision. And there is no more subtle
truth than that of the everyday phrase about a
man having “his heart in the right place.” It
involves the idea of normal proportion ; not only
does a certain function exist, but it is rightly
related to other functions. Indeed, the nega¬
tion of this phrase would describe with peculiar
accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and per¬
verse tenderness of the most representative
modems. If, for instance, I had to describe
with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard
Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly
than by saying that he has a heroically large
and generous heart ; but not a heart in the right
place. And this is so of the typical society of
our time.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways
the modern world is far too good. It is full of

52

The Suicide of T bought

wild and wasted virtues. When a religious
scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shat¬
tered at the Reformation), it is not merely the
vices that are let loose. The vic$s are, indeed,
let loose, and they wander and do damage.
But the virtues are let loose also; and the vir¬
tues wander more wildly, and the virtues do
more terrible damage. The modern world is
full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.
The virtues have gone mad because they have
been isolated from each other and are wander¬
ing alone. Thus some scientists care for truth;
and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humani¬
tarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am
sorry to say) is often untruthful. \ For example,
Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he
is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely
mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity.
He has a strange idea that he will make it
easier to forgive sins by saying that there are
no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only
an early Christian, he is the only early Chris¬
tian who ought really to have been eaten by
lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is
really true: his mercy would mean mere an¬
archy. He really is the enemy of the human
race — because he is so human. As the other
extreme, we may take the acrid realist, who has

53

Orthodoxy

deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure
in happy tales or in the healing of the heart.
Torquemada tortured people physically for the
sake of moral truth. Zola tortured people
morally for the sake of physical truth. But in
Torquemada’s time there was at least a system
that could to some extent make righteousness
and peace kiss each other. Now they do not
even bow. But a much stronger case than
these two of truth and pity can be found in the
remarkable case of the dislocation of humility.

It is only with one aspect of humility that we
are here concerned. Humility was largely
meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and
infinity of the appetite of man. He was always
outstripping his mercies with his own newly
invented needs. His very power of enjoyment
destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure,
he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure
is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a
man would make his world large, he must be
always making himself small. Even the haughty
visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pin¬
nacles are the creations of humility. Giants
that tread down forests like grass are the crea¬
tions of humility. Towers that vanish upwards
above the loneliest star are the creations of
humility. For towers are not tall unless we

54

The Suicide of Thought

look up at them; and giants are not giants unless
they are larger than we. All this gigantesque
imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest
of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely
humble. It is impossible without humility to
enjoy anything — even pride.

But what we suffer from to-day is humility
in,the wrong place. Modesty has moved from
the • organ of ambition. Modesty has settled
upon the organ of conviction; where it was
never meant to be. A man was meant to be
doubtful about himself, but undoubting about
the truth; this has been exactly reversed.) Now¬
adays the part of a man that a man does assert
is exactly the part he ought not to assert —
himself. The part he doubts is exactly the
part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Rea¬
son. Huxley preached a humility content to
learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so
humble that he doubts if he can even learn.
Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily
that there is no humility typical of our time.
The truth is that there is a real humility typical
of our time; but it so happens that it is
practically a more poisonous humility than the
wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old
humility was a spur that prevented a man from
stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented

55

Orthodoxy

him from going on. For the old humility made
a man doubtful about his efforts, which might
make him work harder. But the new humility
makes a man doubtful about his aims, which
will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man
who utters the frantic and blasphemous state¬
ment that he may be wrong. Every day one
comes across somebody who says that of course
his view may not be the right one. Of course
his view must be the right one, or it is not his
view. We are on the road to producing a race
of men too mentally modest to believe in the
multiplication table. We are in danger of see¬
ing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity
as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers
of old time were too proud to be convinced;
but these are too humble to be convinced. The
meek do inherit the earth; but the modem
sceptics are too meek even to claim their in¬
heritance. It is exactly this intellectual help¬
lessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter has been concerned only
with a fact of observation: that what peril of
morbidity there is for man comes rather from
his reason than his imagination. It was not
meant to attack the authority of reason; rather
it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For

56

The Suicide of T bought

it needs defence. The whole modern world is
at war with reason ; and the tower already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer
to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with
our sages is not that they cannot see the answer;
it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They
are like children so stupid as to notice nothing
paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door
is not a door. The modern latitudinarians
speak, for instance, about authority in religion
not only as if there were no reason in it, but as
if there had never been any reason for it. Apart
from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot
even see its historical cause. Religious author¬
ity has often, doubtless, been oppressive or un¬
reasonable; just as every legal system (and
especially our present one) has been callous and
full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack
the police ; nay, it is glorious. But the modern
critics of religious authority are like men who
should attack the police without ever having
heard of burglars. For there is a great and
possible peril to the human mind: a peril as
practical as burglary. Against it religious
authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a
barrier. And against it something certainly
must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to
avoid ruin.

57

Orthodoxy

That peril is that the human intellect is free
to destroy itself. Just as one generation could
prevent the very existence of the next genera¬
tion, by all entering a monastery or jumping
into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some
degree prevent further thinking by teaching the
next generation that there is no validity in any
human thought. It is idle to talk always of
the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is
itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to
assert that our thoughts have any relation to
reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you
must sooner or later ask yourself the question,
“Why should anything go right; even observa¬
tion and deduction? Why should not good
logic be as misleading as bad logic ? They are
both movements in the brain of a bewildered
ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a
right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic,
the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to
think for myself. I have no right to think at
all.”

There is a thought that stops thought. That
is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
That is the ultimate evil against which all re¬
ligious authority was aimed. It only appears
at the end of decadent ages like our own: and
already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous

58

The Suicide of Thought

banner; he has written a delicate piece of scep¬
ticism called “Doubts of the Instrument.” In
this he questions the brain itself, and endea¬
vours to remove all reality from all his own
assertions, past, present, and to come. But
it was against this remote ruin that all the
military systems in religion were originally
ranked and ruled. The creeds and the cru¬
sades, the hierarchies and the horrible perse¬
cutions were not organized, as is ignorantly
said, for the suppression of reason. They were
organized for the difficult defence of reason.
Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once
things were wildly questioned, reason could be
questioned first. The authority of priests to
absolve, the authority of popes to define the
authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these
were all only dark defences erected round one
central authority, more undemonstrable, more
supernatural than all — the authority of a man
to think. We know now that this is so; we
have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can
hear scepticism crashing through the old ring
of authorities, and at the same moment we can
see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far-
as religion is gone, reason is going. For they
are both of the same primary and authoritative
kind. They are both methods of proof which

59

Orthodoxy

cannot themselves be proved. And in the act
of destroying the idea of Divine authority we
have largely destroyed the idea of that human
authority by which we do a long-division sum.
With a long and sustained tug we have attempted
to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his
head has come off with it.

Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is
perhaps desirable, though dull, to run rapidly
through the chief modern fashions of thought
which have this effect of stopping thought itself.
Materialism and the view of everything as a
personal illusion have some such effect; for if
the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very
exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is
nothing to think about. But in these cases the
effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it
is direct and clear; notably in the case of what
is generally called evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern
intelligence which, if it destroys anything, de¬
stroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent
scientific description of how certain earthly
things came about; or, if it is anything more
than this, it is an attack upon thought itself.
If evolution destroys anything, it does not
destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution
simply means that a positive thing called an

60

The Suicide of Thought

ape turned very slowly into a positive thing
called a man, then it is stingless for the most
orthodox; for a personal God might just as well
do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like
the Christian God, he were outside time. But
if it means anything more, it means that there
is no such thing as an ape to change, and no
such thing as a man for him to change into.
It means that there is no such thing as a thing.
At best, there is only one thing, and that is a
flux of everything and anything. This is an
attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind;
you cannot think if there are no things to think
about. You cannot think if you are not sep¬
arate from the subject of thought. Descartes
said, “I think; therefore I am.” The philo¬
sophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the
epigram. He says, “I am not; therefore I
cannot think.”

Then there is the opposite attack on thought :
that urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists
that every separate thing is “unique,” and
there are no categories at all. This also is
merely destructive. Thinking means connect¬
ing things, and stops if they cannot be connected.
It need hardly be said that this scepticism for¬
bidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a
man cannot open his mouth without contra-

61

Orthodoxy

dieting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he
did somewhere), “All chairs are quite differ¬
ent,” he utters not merely a misstatement, but
a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were
quite different, you could not call them “all
chairs.”

Akin to these is the false theory of progress,
which maintains that we alter the test instead of
trying to pass the test. We often hear it said,
for instance, “What is right in one age is wrong
in another.” This is quite reasonable, if it
means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain
methods attain at certain times and not at
other times. If women, say, desire to be
elegant, it may be that they are improved at
one time by growing fatter and at another time
by growing thinner. But you cannot say that
they are improved by ceasing to wish to be
elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong.
If the standard changes, how can there be
improvement, which implies a standard ?
Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men
had once sought as good what we now call evil ;
if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or
even falling short of them. How can you over¬
take Jones if you walk in the other direction?
You cannot discuss whether one people has suc¬
ceeded more in being miserable than another

62

The Suicide of Thought

succeeded in being happy. It would be like
discussing whether Milton was more puritanical
than a pig is fat.

It is true that a man (a silly man) might
make change itself his object or ideal. But as
an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.
If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his
own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the
ideal of change ; he must not begin to flirt gaily
with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself
cannot progress. It is worth remark, in pass¬
ing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather
weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite
alteration in society, he instinctively took a
metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium.
He wrote —

“ Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
grooves of change.”

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable
groove; and so it is. Change is about the
narrowest and hardest groove that a man can
get into.

The main point here, however, is that this
idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard
is one of the things that make thought about the
past or future simply impossible. The theory
of a complete change of standards in human

63

Orthodoxy

history does not merely deprive us of the pleas¬
ure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us
even of the more modern and aristocratic
pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying
forces of our time would not be complete with¬
out some reference to pragmatism; for though
I have here used and should everywhere defend
the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide
to truth, there is an extreme application of it
which involves the absence of all truth what¬
ever. My meaning can be put shortly thus.
I agree with the pragmatists that apparent ob¬
jective truth is not the whole matter; that there
is an authoritative need to believe the things
that are necessary to the human mind. But I
say that one of those necessities precisely is a
belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells
a man to think what he must think and never
mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the
things that he must think is the Absolute. This
philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox.
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and
one of the first of human needs is to be some¬
thing more than a pragmatist. Extreme prag¬
matism is just as inhuman as the determinism
it so powerfully attacks. The determinist
(who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be

64

The Suicide of Thought

a human being) makes nonsense of the human
sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who
professes to be specially human, makes non¬
sense of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may
say that the most characteristic current philo¬
sophies have not only a touch of mania, but a
touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner
has knocked his head against the limits of
human thought; and cracked it. This is what
makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox
and the boasts of the advanced about the
dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we
are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought ;
it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free
thought. It is vain for bishops and pious big¬
wigs to discuss what dreadful things will hap¬
pen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has
run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists
to talk of the great truths that will be revealed
if once we see free thought begin. We have
seen it end. It has no more questions to ask;
it has questioned itself. You cannot call up
any wilder vision than a city in which men ask
themselves if they have any selves. You cannot
fancy a more sceptical world than that in which
men doubt if there is a world. It might cer¬
tainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly

65

Orthodoxy

and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered
by the application of indefensible laws of blas¬
phemy or by the absurcj pretence that modern
England is Christian. But it would have
reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant
atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather
because they are an old minority than because
they are a new one. Free thought has ex¬
hausted its own freedom. It is weary of its
own success. If any eager freethinker now
hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is
only like the man in Mark Twain who came
out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise
and was just in time to see it set. If any fright¬
ened curate still says that it will be awful if the
darkness of free thought should spread, we can
only answer him in the high and powerful
words of Mr. Belloc, “Do not, I beseech you,
be troubled about the increase of forces already
in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour
of the night: it is already morning.” We have
no more questions left to ask. We have looked
for questions in the darkest corners and on the
wildest peaks. We have found all the ques¬
tions that can be found. It is time we gave up
looking for questions and began looking for
answers.

But one more word must be added. At the

66

The Suicide of Thought

beginning of this preliminary negative sketch
I said that our mental ruin has been wrought
by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A
man does not go mad because he makes a
statue a mile high, but he may go mad by
thinking it out in square inches. Now, one
school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at
it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the
world. They see that reason destroys; but
Will, they say, creates. The ultimate author¬
ity, they say, is in will, not in reason. The
supreme point is not why a man demands a
thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I
have no space to trace or expound this philo¬
sophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through
Nietzsche, who preached something that is
called egoism. That, indeed, was simple-
minded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism
simply by preaching it. To preach anything
is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life
a war without mercy, and then he takes the
greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in
war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
But however it began, the view is common
enough in current literature. The main de¬
fence of these thinkers is that they are not
thinkers; they are makers. They say that
choice is itself the divine thing. Thus Mr.

67

Orthodoxy

Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that
men’s acts are to be judged by the standard of
the desire of happiness. He says that a man
does not act for his happiness, but from his
will. He does not say, “Jam will make me
happy,” but “I want jam.” And in all this
others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm.
Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so
passionately excited about it that he is obliged
to write prose. He publishes a short play with
several long prefaces. This is natural enough
in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: Mr.
Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who
has never . written any poetry. But that Mr.
Davidson (who can write excellent poetry)
should write instead laborious metaphysics in
defence of this doctrine of will, does show that
the doctrine of will has taken hold of men.
Even Mr. H. G. Wells has half spoken in its
language; saying that one should test acts not
like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, “I
jeel this curve is right,” or “that line shall go
thus.” They are all excited; and well they
may be. For by this doctrine of the divine
authority of will, they think they can break
out of the doomed fortress of rationalism.
They think they can escape.

But they cannot escape. This pure praise

68

The Suicide of Thought

of volition ends in the same break up and blank
as the mere pursuit of logic. Exactly as com¬
plete free thought involves the doubting of
thought itself, so the acceptation of mere “will¬
ing” really paralyzes the will. Mr. Bernard
Shaw has not perceived the real difference be¬
tween the old utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy,
of course, and easily misstated) and that which
he propounds. The real difference between the
test of happiness and the test of will is simply
that the test of happiness is a test and the other
isn’t. You can discuss whether a man’s act in
jumping over a cliff was directed towards hap¬
piness; you cannot discuss whether it was de¬
rived from will. Of course it was. You can
praise an action by saying that it is calculated
to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or
to save the soul. But you cannot praise an
action because it shows will; for to say that is
merely to say that it is an action. By this
praise of will you cannot really choose one
course as better than another. And yet choos¬
ing one course as better than another is the
very definition of the will you are praising.

The worship of will is the negation of will.
To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.
If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and
says, “Will something,” that is tantamount to

69

Orthodoxy

saying, “I do not mind what you will,” and
that is tantamount to saying, “I have no will
in the matter.” You cannot admire will in
general, because the essence of will is that it is
particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John
Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary
morality, and therefore he invokes will — will
to anything. He only wants humanity to want
something. But humanity does want some¬
thing. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels
against the law and tells us to will something
or anything. But we have willed something.
We have willed the law against which he rebels.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to
Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of voli¬
tion. They cannot will, they can hardly wish.
And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be
found quite easily. It can be found in this
fact: that they always talk of will as something
that expands and breaks out. But it is quite
the opposite. Every act of will is an act of
self-limitation. To desire action is to desire
limitation. In that sense every act is an act
of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything,
you reject everything else. That objection,
which men of this school used to make to the
act of marriage, is really an objection to every
act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and

7°

The Suicide of T bought

exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman
you give up all the others, so when you take
one course of action you give up all the other
courses. If you become King of England, you
give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If
you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive
life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this
negative or limiting side of will that makes
most of the talk of the anarchic will-worship¬
pers little better than nonsense. For instance,
Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to
do with “Thou shalt not”; but it is surely
obvious that “Thou shalt not” is only one of
the necessary corollaries of “I will.” “I will
go to the Lord Mayor’s Show, and thou shalt
not stop me.” Anarchism adjures us to be
bold creative artists, and care for no laws or
limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and
not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation ;
the essence of every picture is the frame. If
you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a
long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you
hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short
neck, you will really find that you are not free
to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into
the world of facts, you step into a world of
limits. You can free things from alien or acci¬
dental laws, but not from the laws of their own

71

Orthodoxy

nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from
his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump :
you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging
triangles to break out of the prison of their
three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its
three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.
Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of
the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure
that if triangles ever were loved, they were
loved for being triangular. This is certainly
the case with all artistic creation, which is in
some ways the most decisive example of pure
will. The artist loves his limitations: they
constitute the thing he is doing. The painter
is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is
glad that the clay is colourless.

In case the point is not clear, an historic
example may illustrate it. The French Revo¬
lution was really an heroic and decisive thing,
because the Jacobins willed something definite
and limited. They desired the freedoms of
democracy, but also all the vetoes of democ¬
racy. They wished to have votes and not to
have titles. Republicanism had an ascetic side
in Franklin or Robespierre as well as an ex¬
pansive side in Danton or Wilkes. Therefore

72

The Suicide of Thought

they have created something with a solid sub¬
stance and shape, the square social equality
and peasant wealth of France. But since then
the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe
has been weakened by shrinking from any pro¬
posal because of the limits of that proposal.
Liberalism has been degraded into liberality.
Men have tried to turn “revolutionise” from a
transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin
could tell you not only the system he would
rebel against, but (what was more important)
the system he would not rebel against, the sys¬
tem he would trust. But the new rebel is a
sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything.
He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be
really a revolutionist. And the fact that he
doubts everything really gets in his way when
he wants to denounce anything. For all de¬
nunciation implies a moral doctrine of some
kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not
only the institution he denounces, but the
doctrine by which he denounces it./ Thus he
writes one book complaining that imperial op¬
pression insults the purity of women, and then
he writes another book (about the sex problem)
in which he insults it himself. He curses the
Sultan because Christian girls lose their vir¬
ginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because

73

Orthodoxy

they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out
that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philo¬
sopher, that all life is waste of time. A Rus¬
sian pessimist will denounce a policeman for
killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest
philosophical principles that the peasant ought
to have killed himself. A man denounces
marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristo¬
cratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He
calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the op¬
pressors of Poland or Ireland because they take
away that bauble. The man of this school
goes first to a political meeting, where he com¬
plains that savages are treated as if they were
beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and
goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves
that they practically are beasts. In short, the
modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic,
is always engaged in undermining his own
mines. In his book on politics he attacks men
for trampling on morality ; in his book on ethics
he attacks morality for trampling on men.
Therefore the modem man in revolt has be¬
come practically useless for all purposes of
revolt. By rebelling against everything he has
lost his right to rebel against anything.

It may be added that the same blank and
bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce and

74

The Suicide of Thought

terrible types of literature, especially in satire.
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it pre¬
supposes an admitted superiority in certain
things over others; it presupposes a standard.
When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness
of some distinguished journalist, they are un¬
consciously assuming a standard of Greek
sculpture. They are appealing to the marble
Apollo. And the curious disappearance of
satire from our literature is an instance of the
fierce things fading for want of any principle
to be fierce about. Nietzsche had some natural
talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he
could not laugh; but there is always something
bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply
because it has not any mass of common morality
behind it. He is himself more preposterous
than anything he denounces. But, indeed,
Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the
whole of this failure of abstract violence. The
softening of the brain which ultimately over¬
took him was not a physical accident. If
Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzsche-
ism would end in imbecility. Thinking in iso¬
lation and with pride ends in being an idiot.
Every man who will not have softening of the
heart must at last have softening of the brain.

This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends

75

Orthodoxy

in intellectualism, and therefore in death. The
sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawless¬
ness and the materialist worship of law end in
the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering
mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet.
He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of
nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless
— one because he must not grasp anything,
and the other because he must not let go of
anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a
Buddhist instinct that all special actions are
evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally
frozen by his view that all special actions are
good; for if all special actions are good, none of
them are special. They stand at the cross¬
roads, and one hates all the roads and the other
likes all the roads. The result is — well, some
things are not hard to calculate. They stand
at the cross-roads.

Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest
business of this book — the rough review of
recent thought. After this I begin to sketch
a view of life which may not interest my reader,
but which, at any rate, interests me. In front
of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern
books that I have been turning over for the
purpose — a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.
By the accident of my present detachment, I

76

The Suicide of Thought

can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies
of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and
Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash
could be seen from a balloon. They are all on
the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For
madness may be defined as using mental activity
so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have
nearly reached it. He who thinks he is made
of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought;
for glass cannot think. So he who wills to
reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for
will is not only the choice of something, but the
rejection of almost everything. And as I turn
and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tire¬
some, and useless modem books, the title of
one of them rivets my eye. It is called “ Jeanne
d’Arc,” by Anatole France. I have only
glanced at it, but a glance was enough to re¬
mind me of Renan’s “Vie de Jesus.” It has
the same strange method of the reverent sceptic.
It discredits supernatural stories that have some
foundation, simply by telling natural stories
that have no foundation. Because we cannot
believe in what a saint did, we are to pretend
that we know exactly what he felt. But I do
not mention either book in order to criticise it,
but because the accidental combination of the
names called up two startling images of sanity

77

Orthodoxy

which blasted all the books before me. Joan
of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either
by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by
accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose
a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.
Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in
her all that was true either in Tolstoy or
Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either
of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tol¬
stoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in
plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the
reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed
back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this
great addition, that she endured poverty as well
as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical
aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And
then I thought of all that was brave and proud
and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny
against the emptiness and timidity of our time.
I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium
of danger, his hunger for the rush of great
horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had
all that, and again with this difference, that she
did not praise fighting, but fought. We know
that she was not afraid of an army, while
Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a
cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she
was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the

78

The Suicide of Thought

warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them
both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was
more gentle than the one, more violent than
the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical
person who did something, while they are wild
speculators who do nothing. It was impossible
that the thought should not cross my mind that
she and her faith had perhaps some secret of
moral unity and utility that has been lost.
And with that thought came a larger one, and
the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed
the theatre of my thoughts. The same modern
difficulty which darkened the subject-matter of
Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest
Renan. Renan also divided his hero’s pity
from his hero’s pugnacity. Renan even repre¬
sented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a
mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic ex¬
pectations of Galilee. As if there were any
inconsistency between having a love for hu¬
manity and having a hatred for inhumanity!
Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce
Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner
and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altru¬
ist. In our present atmosphere such cavils are
comprehensible enough. The love of a hero
is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.
The hatred of a hero is more generous than the

79

Orthodoxy

love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and
heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect
the fragments. There is a giant of whom we
see only the lopped arms and legs walking
about. They have torn the soul of Christ
into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism,
and they are equally puzzled by His insane
magnificence and His insane meekness. They
have parted His garments among them, and for
His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat
was without seam woven from the top through¬
out.

80

IV — The Ethics of Elfland

WHEN the business man rebukes the
idealism of his office-boy, it is
commonly in some such speech as
this: “Ah, yes, when one is young,
one has these ideals in the abstract and these
castles in the air; but in middle age they all
break up like clouds, and one comes down to a
belief in practical politics, to using the ma¬
chinery one has and getting on with the world as
it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philan¬
thropic old men now in their honoured graves
used to talk to me when I was a boy. But
since then I have grown up and have discov¬
ered that these philanthropic old men were
telling lies. What has really happened is
exactly the opposite of what they said would
happen. They said that I should lose my
ideals and begin to believe in the methods of
practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my
ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is
exactly what it always was. What I have lost
is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I
am still as much concerned as ever about the
Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much

81

Orthodoxy

concerned about the General Election. As a
babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the
mere mention of it. No; the vision is always
solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact.
It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much
as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in
Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of inno¬
cence when I believed in Liberals.

I take this instance of one of the enduring
faiths because, having now to trace the roots of
my personal speculation, this may be counted, I
think, as the only positive bias. I was brought
up a Liberal, and have always believed in
democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine
of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds
the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only
pause for a moment to explain that the principle
of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in
two propositions. The first is this: that the
things common to all men are more important
than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary
things are more valuable than extraordinary
things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man
is something more awful than men; something
more strange. The sense of the miracle of
humanity itself should be always more vivid
to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art,
or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as

82

The Ethics of Elfland

such, should be felt as something more heart¬
breaking than any music and more startling
than any caricature. Death is more tragic even
than death by starvation. Having a nose is
more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that
the essential things in men are the things they
hold in common, not the things they hold
separately. And the second principle is merely
this: that the political instinct or desire is one
of these things which they hold in common.
Falling in love is more poetical than dropping
into poetry. The democratic contention is that
government (helping to rule the tribe) is a
thing like falling in love, and not a thing like
dropping into poetry. It is not something
analogous to playing the church organ, painting
on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that
insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astron¬
omer Royal, and so on. For these things we
do not wish a man to do at all unless he does
them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing
analogous to writing one’s own love-letters or
blowing one’s own nose. These things we
want a man to do for himself, even if he does
them badly. I am not here arguing the truth
of any of these conceptions; I know that some
moderns are asking to have their wives chosen

83

Orthodoxy

by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for
all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses.
I merely say that mankind does recognize these
universal human functions, and that democracy
classes government among them. In short, the
democratic faith is this: that the most terribly
important things must be left to ordinary men
themselves — the mating of the sexes, the rear¬
ing of the young, the laws of the state. This
is democracy; and in this I have always be¬
lieved.

But there is one thing that I have never from
my youth up been able to understand. I have
never been able to understand where people
got the idea that democracy was in some way
opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradi¬
tion is only democracy extended through time.
It is trusting to a consensus of common human
voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary
record. The man who quotes some German
historian against the tradition of the Catholic
Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to
aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority
of one expert against the awful authority of a
mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is
treated, and ought to be treated, more respect¬
fully than a book of history. The legend is
generally made by the majority of people in the

84

The Ethics of Elfland

village, who are sane. The book is generally
written by the one man in the village who is
mad. Those who urge against tradition that
men in the past were ignorant may go and urge
it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement
that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will
not do for us. If we attach great importance
to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanim¬
ity when we are dealing with daily matters,
there is no reason why we should disregard it
when we are dealing with history or fable. Tra¬
dition may be defined as an extension of the
franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the
most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It
is the democracy of the dead. Tradition re¬
fuses to submit to the small and arrogant
oligarchy of those who merely happen to be
walking about. All democrats object to men
being disqualified by the accident of birth; tra¬
dition objects to their being disqualified by the
accident of death. Democracy tells us not to
neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our
groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good
man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at
any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of
democracy and tradition; it seems evident to
me that they are the same idea. We will have
the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks

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Orthodoxy

voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones.
It is all quite regular and official, for most
tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked
with a cross.

I have first to say, therefore, that if I have
had a bias, it was always a bias in favour of
democracy, and therefore of tradition. Before
we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings
I am content to allow for that personal equa¬
tion; I have always been more inclined to be¬
lieve the ruck of hard-working people than to
believe that special and troublesome literary
class to which I belong. I prefer even the
fancies and prejudices of the people who see
life from the inside to the clearest demonstra¬
tions of the people who see life from the outside.
I would always trust the old wives’ fables against
the old maids’ facts. As long as wit is mother
wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

Now, I have to put together a general posi¬
tion, and I pretend to no training in such things.
I propose to do it, therefore, by writing down
one after another the three or four fundamental
ideas which I have found for myself, pretty
much in the way that I found them. Then I
shall roughly synthesise them, summing up my
personal philosophy or natural religion; then I
shall describe my startling discovery that the

86

The Ethics of Elfland

whole thing had been discovered before. It
had been discovered by Christianity. But of
these profound persuasions which I have to
recount in order, the earliest was concerned
with this element of popular tradition. And
without the foregoing explanation touching
tradition and democracy I could hardly make
my mental experience clear. As it is, I do not
know whether I can make it clear, but I now
propose to try.

My first and last philosophy, that which I
believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in
the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse ;
that is, from the solemn and star-appointed
priestess at once of democracy and tradition.
The things I believed most then, the things I
believe most now, are the things called fairy
tales. They seem to me to be the entirely
reasonable things. They are not fantasies:
compared with them other things are fantastic.
Compared with them religion and rationalism
are both abnormal, though religion is abnor¬
mally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.
Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of
common sense. It is not earth that judges
heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for
me at least it was not earth that criticised elf¬
land, but elfland that criticised the earth. I

87

Orthodoxy

knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted
beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon
before I was certain of the moon. This was
at one with all popular tradition. Modern
minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the
bush or the brook; but the singers of the old
epics and fables were supernaturalists, and
talked about the gods of brook and bush. That
is what the moderns mean when they say that
the ancients did not “appreciate Nature,” be¬
cause they said that Nature was divine. Old
nurses do not tell children about the grass, but
about the fairies that dance on the grass; and
the old Greeks could not see the trees for the
dryads.

But I deal here with what ethic and philo¬
sophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If
I were describing them in detail I could note
many noble and healthy principles that arise
from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of
“Jack the Giant Killer”; that giants should be
killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly
mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is
older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin
has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is
the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same
as that of the Magnificat — exaltavit humiles.
There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the

88

The Ethics of Elfland

Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is
loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the
“ Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human
creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet
cursed with death; and how death also may
perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not
concerned with any of the separate statutes of
elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law,
which I learnt before I could speak, and shall
retain when I cannot write. I am concerned
with a certain way of looking at life, which was
created in me by the fairy tales, but has since
been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

It might be stated this way. There are cer¬
tain sequences or developments (cases of one
thing following another), which are, in the true
sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in
the true sense of the word, necessary. Such
are mathematical and merely logical sequences.
We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable
of all creatures) admit that reason and that
necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are
older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and
awful sense) necessary that Cinderella is younger
than the Ugly Sisters. .There is no getting out
of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism
about that fact as he pleases: it really must be.
If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the

89

Orthodoxy

father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from
her awful throne: and we in fairyland submit.
If the three brothers all ride horses, there are
six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is
true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it.
But as I put my head over the hedge of the
elves and began to take notice of the natural
world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I
observed that learned men in spectacles were
talking of the actual things that happened —
dawn and death and so on — as if they were
rational and inevitable. They talked as if the
fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary
as the fact that two and one trees make three.
But it is not. There is an enormous difference
by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the
imagination. You cannot imagine two and
one not making three. But you can easily
imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imag¬
ine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers
hanging on by the tail. These men in spec¬
tacles spoke much of a man named Newton,
who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a
law. But they could not be got to see the dis¬
tinction between a true law, a law of reason,
and the mere fact of apples falling. If the
apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the
apple. That is a true necessity: because we

90

The Ethics of Elfland

cannot conceive the one occurring without the
other. But we can quite well conceive the
apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it
flying ardently through the air to hit some
other nose, of which it had a more definite dis¬
like. We have always in our fairy tales kept
this sharp distinction between the science of
mental relations, in which there really are laws,
and the science of physical facts, in which there
are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We
believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental
impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk
climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all
confuse our convictions on the philosophical
question of how many beans make five.

Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and
truth in the nursery tales. The man of science
says, “Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”;
but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really
led up to the other. The witch in the fairy
tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle
will fall”; but she does not say it as if it were
something in which the effect obviously arose
out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the
advice to many champions, and has seen many
castles fall, but she does not lose either her
wonder or her reason. She does not muddle
her head until it imagines a necessary mental

91

Orthodoxy

connection between a horn and a falling tower.
But the scientific men do muddle their heads,
until they imagine a necessary mental connec¬
tion between an apple leaving the tree and an
apple reaching the ground. They do really
talk as if they had found not only a set of mar^
vellous facts, but a truth connecting those
facts. They do talk as if the connection of
two strange things physically connected them
philosophically. They feel that because one
incomprehensible thing constantly follows an¬
other incomprehensible thing the two together
somehow make up a comprehensible thing.
Two black riddles make a white answer.

In fairyland we avoid the word “law”; but
in the land of science they are singularly fond
of it. Thus they will call some interesting
conjecture about how forgotten folks pro¬
nounced the alphabet, Grimm’s Law. But
Grimm’s Law is far less intellectual than
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any
rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law.
A law implies that we know the nature of the
generalisation and enactment; not merely that
we have noticed some of the effects. If there
is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it
implies that there is an imaginable mental
connection between the idea of prison and the

93

The Ethics of Elftand

idea of picking pockets. And we know what
the idea is. We can say why we take liberty
from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot
say why an egg can turn into a chicken any
more than we can say why a bear could turn
into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the
chicken are further off from each other than
the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself
suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do sug¬
gest bears. Granted, then, that certain trans¬
formations do happen, it is essential that we
should regard them in the philosophic manner
of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner
of science and the “Laws of Nature.” When
we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits
fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the
fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella
asked her why mice turned to horses or her
clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We
must answer that it is magic. It is not a “law,”
for we do not understand its general formula.
It is not a necessity, for though we can count
on it happening practically, we have no right
to say that it must always happen. It is no
argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fan¬
cied) that we count on the ordinary course of
things. We do not count on it; we bet on it.
We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as

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Orthodoxy

we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-
destroying comet. We leave it out of account,
not because it is a miracle, and therefore an
impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and
therefore an exception. All the terms used in
the science books, “law,” ‘‘necessity,” “order,”
“tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual,
because they assume an inner synthesis, which
we do not possess. The only words that ever
satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms
used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,”
“enchantment.” They express the arbitrari¬
ness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows
fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs
downhill because it is bewitched. The sun
shines because it is bewitched.

I deny altogether that this is fantastic or
even mystical. We may have some mysticism
later on; but this fairy-tale language about
things is simply rational and agnostic. It is
the only way I can express in words my clear
and definite perception that one thing is quite
distinct from another; that there is no logical
connection between flying and laying eggs.
It is the man who talks about “a law” that he
has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the
ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimen¬
talist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential

94

The Ethics of Elfiand

sense, that he is soaked and swept away by
mere associations. He has so often seen birds
fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must
be some dreamy, tender connection between
the two ideas, whereas there is none. A for¬
lorn lover might be unable to dissociate the
moon from lost love ; so the materialist is unable
to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both
cases there is no connection, except that one
has seen them together. A sentimentalist might
shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, be¬
cause, by a dark association of his own, it re¬
minded him of his boyhood. So the materialist
professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet
a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association
of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of
apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland
does not see why, in the abstract, the apple
tree should not grow crimson tulips; it some¬
times does in his country.

This elementary wonder, however, is not a
mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the
contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived
from this. Just as we all like love tales be¬
cause there is an instinct of sex, we all like
astonishing tales because they touch the nerve
of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This
is proved by the fact that when we are very

95

Orthodoxy

young children we do not need fairy tales: we
only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough.
A child of seven is excited by being told that
Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.
But a child of three is excited by being told that
Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic
tales; but babies like realistic tales — because
they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is
about the only person, I should think, to whom
a modern realistic novel could be read without
boring him. This proves that even nursery
tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of
interest and amazement. These tales say that
apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten
moment when we found that they were green.
They make rivers run with wine only to make
us remember, for one wild moment, that they
run with water. I have said that this is wholly
reasonable and even agnostic. And, indeed,
on this point I am all for the higher agnosti¬
cism; its better name is Ignorance. We have
all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all
romances, the story of the man who has for¬
gotten his name. This man walks about the
streets and can see and appreciate everything;
only he cannot remember who he is. Well,
every man is that man in the story. Every
man has forgotten who he is. One may under-

96

The Ethics of Elfland

stand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is
more distant than any star. Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know
thyself. We are all under the same mental
calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We
have all forgotten what we really are. All that
we call common sense and rationality and prac¬
ticality and positivism only means that for
certain dead levels of our life we forget that we
have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art
and ecstacy only means that for one awful
instant we remember that we forget.

But though (like the man without memory
in the novel) we walk the streets with a sort of
half-witted admiration, still it is admiration.
It is admiration in English and not only admira¬
tion in Latin. The wonder has a positive
element of praise. This is the next milestone
to be definitely marked on our road through
fairyland. I shall speak in the next chapter
about optimists and pessimists in their intellec¬
tual aspect, so far as they have one. Here I
am only trying to describe the enormous emo¬
tions which cannot be described. And the
strongest emotion was that life was as precious
as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because
it was an adventure; it was an adventure be¬
cause it was an opportunity. The goodness of

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Orthodoxy

the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that
there might be more dragons than princesses;
it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of
all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful,
though I hardly knew to whom. Children are
grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stock¬
ings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be
grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my
stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We
thank people for birthday presents of cigars
and slippers. Can I thank no one for the
birthday present of birth?

There were, then, these two first feelings,
indefensible and indisputable. The world was
a shock, but it was not merely shocking; exist¬
ence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant sur¬
prise. In fact, all my first views were exactly
uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from
boyhood. The question was, “What did the
first frog say?” And the answer was, “Lord,
how you made me jump!” That says suc¬
cinctly all that I am saying. God made the
frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping. But
when these things are settled there enters the
second great principle of the fairy philosophy.

Any one can see it who will simply read
“Grimm’s Fairy Tales” or the fine collections
of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of

98

The Ethics of Elfland

pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Condi¬
tional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue
in an “if”; according to elfin ethics all virtue
is in an “if.” The note of the fairy utterance
always is, “You may live in a palace of gold
and sapphire, if you do not say the word ‘ cow ’ ” ;
or “You may live happily with the King’s
daughter, if you do not show her an onion.”
The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the
dizzy and colossal things conceded depend
upon one small thing withheld. All the wild
and whirling things that are let loose depend
upon one thing that is forbidden. Mr. W. B.
Yeats, in his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry,
describes the elves as lawless; they plunge in
innocent anarchy on the unbridled horses of
the air —

“ Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,

And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”

It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W. B.
Yeats does not understand fairyland. But I
do say it. He is an ironical Irishman, full of
intellectual reactions. He is not stupid enough
to understand fairyland. Fairies prefer people
of the yokel type like myself; people who gape
and grin and do as they are told. Mr. Yeats
reads into elfland all the righteous insurrection

99

Orthodoxy

of his own race. But the lawlessness of Ire¬
land is a Christian lawlessness, founded on
reason and justice. The Fenian is rebelling
against something he understands only too
well ; but the true citizen of fairyland is obeying
something that he does not understand at all.
In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness
rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A
box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is
forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and
love flies away. A flower is plucked, and
human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten,
and the hope of God is gone.

This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is cer¬
tainly not lawlessness or even liberty, though
men under a mean modern tyranny may think
it liberty by comparison. People out of Port¬
land Gaol might think Fleet Street free; but
closer study will prove that both fairies and
journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy god¬
mothers seem at least as strict as other god¬
mothers. Cinderella received a coach out of
Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere,
but she received a command — which might
have come out of Brixton — that she should
be back by twelve. Also, she had a glass
slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that
glass is so common a substance in folk-lore.

IOO

The Ethics of Elfland

This princess lives in a glass castle, that prin¬
cess on a glass hill ; this one sees all things in a
mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they
will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of
glass everywhere is the expression of the fact
that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the
substance most easily smashed by a housemaid
or a cat. And this fairy-tale sentiment also
sank into me and became my sentiment towards
the whole world. I felt and feel that life itself
is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the
window-pane ; and when the heavens were com¬
pared to the terrible crystal I can remember a
shudder. I was afraid that God would drop
the cosmos with a crash.

Remember, however, that to be breakable is
not the same as to be perishable. Strike a
glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply
do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand
years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man,
either in elfland or on earth; the happiness de¬
pended on not doing something which you could
at any moment do and which, very often, it was
not obvious why you should not do. Now, the
point here is that to me this did not seem un¬
just. If the miller’s third son said to the fairy,
“Explain why I must not stand on my head in
the fairy palace,” the other might fairly reply,

IOI

Orthodoxy

“Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy
palace.” If Cinderella says, “How is it that I
must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother
might answer, “How is it that you are going
there till twelve ?” If I leave a man in my will
ten talking elephants and a hundred winged
horses, he cannot complain if the conditions
partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift.
He must not look a winged horse in the mouth.
And it seemed to me that existence was itself
so very eccentric a legacy that I could not com¬
plain of not understanding the limitations of
the vision when I did not understand the vision
they limited. The frame was no stranger than
the picture. The veto might well be as wild as
the vision; it might be as startling as the sun,
as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and ter¬
rible as the towering trees.

For this reason (we may call it the fairy god¬
mother philosophy) I never could join the
young men of my time in feeling what they
called the general sentiment of revolt. I should
have resisted, let us hope, any rules that were
evil, and with these and their definition I shall
deal in another chapter. But I did not feel
disposed to resist any rule merely because it
was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held
by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the

102

The Ethics of Elftand

payment of a peppercorn : I was willing to hold
the huge estate of earth and heaven by any
such feudal fantasy. It could not well be
wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold
it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical
instance to show my meaning. I could never
mix in the common murmur of that rising
generation against monogamy, because no re¬
striction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected
as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion,
to make love to the moon and then to complain
that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem
seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endym-
ion’s) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one
woman is a small price for so much as seeing
one woman. To complain that I could only
be married once was like complaining that I
had only been bom once. It was incommen¬
surate with the terrible excitement of which
one was talking. It showed, not an exagger¬
ated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility
to it. A man is a fool who complains that he
cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Po¬
lygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is
like a man plucking five pears in mere absence
of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane
limits of language in their eulogy on lovely
things. The thistledown made them weep; a

103

Orthodoxy

burnished beetle brought them to their knees.
Yet their emotion never impressed me for an
instant, for this reason, that it never occurred
to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of
symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast
forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird
sing. Men might go through fire to find a
cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not
even keep sober for the blackbird. They would
not go through common Christian marriage by
way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one
might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary
morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were
not valued because we could not pay for sun¬
sets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we .can pay
for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being
Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor
of the nursery, and I have not found any books
so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of
tradition and democracy, and I have not found
any modem type so sanely radical or so sanely
conservative. But the matter for important
comment was here: that when I first went out
into the mental atmosphere of the modem
world, I found that the modern world was
positively opposed on two points to my nurse
and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a

t

104

The Ethics of Elfland

long time to find out that the modem world is
wrong and my nurse was right. The really
curious thing was this: that modern thought
contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on
its two most essential doctrines. I have ex¬
plained that the fairy tales founded in me two
convictions; first, that this world is a wild and /.
startling place, which might have been quite
different, but which is quite delightful; second, 2.
that before this wildness and delight one may
well be modest and submit to the queerest
limitations of so queer a kindness. But I
found the whole modern world running like a
high tide against both my tendernesses; and the
shock of that collision created two sudden and
spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever
since and which, crude as they were, have since
hardened into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talk¬
ing scientific fatalism; saying that everything is
as it must always have been, being unfolded
without fault from the beginning. The leaf on
the tree is green because it could never have
been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philo¬
sopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely
because it might have been scarlet. He feels
as if it had turned green an instant before he
looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white

Orthodoxy

on the strictly reasonable ground that it might
have been black. Every colour has in it a
bold quality as of choice; the red of garden
roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like
suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something
has been done. But the great determinists of
the nineteenth century were strongly against
this native feeling that something had happened
an instant before. In fact, according to them,
nothing ever really had happened since the
beginning of the world. Nothing ever had
happened since existence had happened; and
even about the date of that they were not very
sure.

The modern world as I found it was solid for
modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things
being as they are. But when I came to ask
them I found they had really no proof of this
unavoidable repetition in things except the fact
that the things were repeated. Now, the mere
repetition made the things to me rather more
weird than more rational. It was as if, having
seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and
dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six
other noses of the same astonishing shape. I
should have fancied for a moment that it must
be some local secret society. So one elephant
having a trunk was odd; but all elephants hav-

106

The Ethics of ElflancL

ing trunks looked like a plot. I speak here
only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once
stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in
Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited
repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster
saying the same thing over and over again.
The grass seemed signalling to me with all its
fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent
upon being understood. The sun would make
me see him if he rose a thousand times. The
recurrences of the universe rose to the madden¬
ing rhythm of an incantation, and I began to
see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates
the modem mind rests ultimately upon one as¬
sumption; a false assumption. It is supposed
that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is
probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People
feel that if the universe was personal it would
vary; if the sun were alive it would dance.
This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact.
For the variation in human affairs is generally
brought into them, not by life, but by death;
by the dying down or breaking off of their
strength or desire. A man varies his move¬
ments because of some slight element of failure
or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because
he is tired of walking; or he walks because he

107

Orthodoxy

is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy
were so gigantic that he never tired of going to
Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly
as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very
speed and ecstacy of his life would have the
stillness of death. The sun rises every morn¬
ing. I do not rise every morning; but the
variation is due not to my activity, but to my
inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular
phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regu¬
larly because he never gets tired of rising. His
routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but
to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be
seen, for instance, in children, when they find
some game or joke that they specially enjoy.
A child kicks his legs rhythmically through
excess, not absence, of life. Because children
have abounding vitality, because they are in
spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things
repeated and unchanged. They always say,
“Do it again”; and the grown-up person does
it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up
people are not strong enough to exult in monot¬
ony. But perhaps God is strong enough to
exult in monotony. It is possible that God
says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun;
and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes

108

The Ethics of Elfland

all daisies alike; it may be that God makes
every daisy separately, but has never got tired
of making them. It may be that He has the
eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned
and grown old, and our Father is younger than
we. The repetition in Nature may not be a
mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg.
If the human being conceives and brings forth
a human child instead of bringing forth a fish,
or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that
we are fixed in an animal fate without life or
purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has
touched the gods, that they admire it from their
starry galleries, and that at the end of every
human drama man is called again and again
before the curtain. Repetition may go on for
millions of years, by mere choice, and at any
instant it may stop. Man may stand on the
earth generation after generation, and yet each
birth be his positively last appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the
shock of my childish emotions meeting the
modern creed in mid-career. I had always
vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense
that they are wonderful: now I began to think
them miracles in the stricter sense that they
were wilful. I mean that they were, or might

109

Orthodoxy

be, repeated exercises of some will. In short,
I had always believed that the world involved
magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved
a magician. And this pointed a profound
emotion always present and sub-conscious; that
this world of ours has some purpose; and if
there is a purpose, there is a person. I had
always felt life first as a story : and if there is
a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second
human tradition. It went against the fairy
feeling about strict limits and conditions. The
one thing it loved to talk about was expansion
and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have
been greatly annoyed if any one had called him
an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regret¬
table that nobody did. But he was an im¬
perialist of the lowest type. He popularized
this contemptible notion that the size of the
solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual
dogma of man. Why should a man surrender
his dignity to the solar system any more than
to a whale? If mere size proves that man is
not the image of God, then a whale may be the
■ image of God; a somewhat formless image;
what one might call an impressionist portrait.
It is quite futile to argue that man is small
compared to the cosmos; for man was always

no

The Ethics of ElflancL

small compared to the nearest tree. But Her¬
bert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would
insist that we had in some way been conquered
and annexed by the astronomical universe. He
spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the
most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish
and their ideals. He turned mankind into a
small nationality. And his evil influence can
be seen even in the most spirited and honour¬
able of later scientific authors; notably in the
early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many
moralists have in an exaggerated way repre¬
sented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells
and his school made the heavens wicked. We
should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence
would come our ruin.

But the expansion of which I speak was
much more evil than all this. I have remarked
that the materialist, like the madman, is in
prison; in the prison of one thought. These
people seemed to think it singularly inspiring
to keep on saying that the prison was very
large. The size of this scientific universe gave
one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went
on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation
could there be anything really interesting; any¬
thing, for instance, such as forgiveness or free
will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of

Orthodoxy

its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like
telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would
be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half
the county. The warder would have nothing
to show the man except more and more long
corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and
empty of all that is human. So these expand¬
ers of the universe had nothing to show us
except more and more infinite corridors of
space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that
is divine.

In fairyland there had been a real law; a law
that could be broken, for the definition of a
law is something that can be broken. But the
machinery of this cosmic prison was something
that could not be broken ; for we ourselves were
only a part of its machinery. We were either
unable to do things or we were destined to do
them. The idea of the mystical condition
quite disappeared; one can neither have the
firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of break¬
ing them. The largeness of this universe had
nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak
which we have praised in the universe of the
poet. This modern universe is literally an
empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free.
One went into larger and larger windowless
rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective;

112

The Ethics of Elfland,

but one never found the smallest window or a
whisper of outer air.

Their infernal parallels seemed to expand
with distance; but for me all good things come
to a point, swords for instance. So finding the
boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my
emotions I began to argue about it a little; and
I soon found that the whole attitude was even
shallower than could have been expected. Ac¬
cording to these people the cosmos was one
thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only
(they would say) while it is one thing it is also
the only thing there is. Why, then, should
one worry particularly to call it large? There
is nothing to compare it with. It would be
just as sensible to call it small. A man may
say, “I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of
stars and its crowd of varied creatures.” But
if it comes to that why should not a man say,
“I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent
number of stars and as neat a provision of
live stock as I wish to see”? One is as good
as the other; they are both mere sentiments.
It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun
is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a
sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger
than it is. A man chooses to have an emotion
about the largeness of the world; why should

1x3

Orthodoxy

he not choose to have an emotion about its
smallness ?

It happened that I had that emotion. When
one is fond of anything one addresses it by
diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-
guardsman. The reason is, that anything,
however huge, that can be conceived of as com¬
plete, can be conceived of as small. If military
moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks
a tail, then the object would be vast because it
would be immeasurable. But the moment you
can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a
small guardsman. The moment you really see
an elephant you can call it “Tiny.” If you
can make a statue of a thing you can make a
statuette of it. These people professed that
the universe was one coherent thing; but they
were not fond of the universe. But I was
frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to
address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and
it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth
I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality
were better expressed by calling the world small
than by calling it large. For about infinity
there was a sort of carelessness which was
the reverse of the fierce and pious care which
I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril
of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but

The Ethi cs of Elfiand

I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is
far more romantic than extravagance. To
them stars were an unending income of half¬
pence; but I felt about the golden sun and the
silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one
sovereign and one shilling.

These subconscious convictions are best hit
off by the colour and tone of certain tales.
Thus I have said that stories of magic alone
can express my sense that life is not only a
pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I
may express this other feeling of cosmic cosi¬
ness by allusion to another book always read in
boyhood, “Robinson Crusoe,” which I read
about this time, and which owes its eternal
vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry
of limits, nay, even the wild romance of pru¬
dence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a
few comforts just snatched from the sea: the
best thing in the book is simply the list of things
saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems
is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes
ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in
the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or
ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the
coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how
happy one could be to have brought it out of
the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But

ns

Orthodoxy

it is a better exercise still to remember how all
things have had this hair-breadth escape : every¬
thing has been saved from a wreck. Every
man has had one horrible adventure: as a
hidden untimely birth he had not been, as
infants that never see the light. Men spoke
much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined
men of genius: and it was common to say that
many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been.
To me it is a more solid and startling fact that
any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-
Have-Been.

But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish)
as if all the order and number of things were
the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship. That
there are two sexes and one sun, was like the
fact that there were two guns and one axe. It
was poignantly urgent that none should be
lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none
could be added. The trees and the planets
seemed like things saved from the wreck: and
when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it
had not been overlooked in the confusion. I
felt economical about the stars as if they were
sapphires (they are called so in Milton’s Eden) :
I hoarded the hills. For the universe is a
single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to
talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this

116

The Ethics of Elfland

jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed
without peer and without price: for there can¬
not be another one.

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the
attempt to utter the unutterable things. These
are my ultimate attitudes towards life ; the soils
for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark
way I thought before I could write, and felt
before I could think : that we may proceed more
easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate
them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this
world does not explain itself. It may be a
miracle with a supernatural explanation ; it may
be a conjuring trick, with a natural explana¬
tion. But the explanation of the conjuring
trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better
than the natural explanations I have heard.
The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I
came to feel as if magic must have a meaning,
and meaning must have some one to mean it.
There was something personal in the world, as
in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant
violently. Third, I thought this purpose beau¬
tiful in its old design, in spite of its defects,
such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper
form of thanks to it is some form of humility
and restraint: we should thank God for beer
and Burgundy by not drinking too much of

117

Orthodoxy

them. We owed, also, an obedience to what¬
ever made us. And last, and strangest, there
had come into my mind a vague and vast im¬
pression that in some way all good was a rem¬
nant to be stored and held sacred out of some
primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as
Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them
from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave
me no encouragement to feel it. And all this
time I had not even thought of Christian the¬
ology.

118

V — The Flag of the World

WHEN I was a boy there were two
curious men running about who
were called the optimist and the
pessimist. I constantly used the
words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I
never had any very special idea of what they
meant. The only thing which might be con¬
sidered evident was that they could not mean
what they said ; for the ordinary verbal explana¬
tion was that the optimist thought this world as
good as it could be, while the pessimist thought
it as bad as it could be. Both these statements
being obviously raving nonsense, one had to
cast about for other explanations. An optimist
could not mean a man who thought everything
right and nothing wrong. For that is mean¬
ingless; it is like calling everything right and
nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the
conclusion that the optimist thought everything
good except the pessimist, and that the pessi¬
mist thought everything bad, except himself.
It would be unfair to omit altogether from the
list the mysterious but suggestive definition said
to have been given by a little girl, “An optimist

Orthodoxy

is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessi¬
mist is a man who looks after your feet.” I
am not sure that this is not the best definition
of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth
in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable
distinction drawn between that more dreary
thinker who thinks merely of our contact with
the earth from moment to moment, and that
happier thinker who considers rather our pri¬
mary power of vision and of choice of road.

But this is a deep mistake in this alternative
of the optimist and the pessimist. The as¬
sumption of it is that a man criticises this world
as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being
shown over a new suite of apartments. If a
man came to this world from some other world
in full possession of his powers he might discuss
whether the advantage of midsummer woods
made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just
as a man looking for lodgings might balance the
presence of a telephone against the absence of a
sea view. But no man is in that position. A
man belongs to this world before he begins to
ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought
for the flag, and often won heroic victories for
the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To
put shortly what seems the essential matter, he
has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

120

The Flag of the World

In the last chapter it has been said that the
primary feeling that this world is strange and
yet attractive is best expressed in fairy tales.
The reader may, if he likes, put down the next
stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature
which commonly comes next in the history of a
boy. We all owe much sound morality to the
penny dreadfuls. Whatever the reason, it
seemed and still seems to me that our attitude
towards life can be better expressed in terms of
a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criti¬
cism and approval. My acceptance of the
universe is not optimism, it is more like patriot¬
ism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The
world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which
we are to leave because it is miserable. It is
the fortress of our family, with the flag flying
on the turret, and the more miserable it is the
less we should leave it. The point is not that
this world is too sad to love or too glad not to
love ; the point is that when you do love a thing,
its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its
sadness a reason for loving it more. All opti¬
mistic thoughts about England and all pessi¬
mistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for
the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and
pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic
patriot.

121

Orthodoxy

Let us suppose we are confronted with a
desperate thing — say Pimlico. If we think
what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the
thread of thought leads to the throne or the
mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for
a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case
he will merely cut his throat or move to Chel¬
sea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to
approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain
Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way
out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pim¬
lico: to love it with a transcendental tie and
without any earthly reason. If there arose a
man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would
rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles;
Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does
when she is loved. For decoration is not given
to hide horrible things: but to decorate things
already adorable. A mother does not give her
child a blue bow because he is so ugly without
it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to
hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers
love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs ,
Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than
Florence. Some readers will say that this is a
mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual
history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how
cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest

122

The Flag of the World

roots of civilization and you will find them
knotted round some sacred stone or encircling
some sacred well. People first paid honour to
a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men
did not love Rome because she was great. She
was great because they had loved her.

The eighteenth-century theories of the social
contract have been exposed to much clumsy
criticism in our time; in so far as they meant
that there is at the back of all historic govern¬
ment an idea of content and co-operation, they
were demonstrably right. But they really were
wrong in so far as they suggested that men had
ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a
conscious exchange of interests. Morality did
not begin by one man saying to another, “I
will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there
is no trace of such a transaction. There is a
trace of both men having said, “We must not
hit each other in the holy place.” They gained
their morality by guarding their religion. They
did not cultivate courage. They fought for the
shrine, and found they had become courageous.
They did not cultivate cleanliness. They puri¬
fied themselves for the altar, and found that
they were clean. The history of the Jews is
the only early document known to most Eng¬
lishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently

123

Orthodoxy

from that. The Ten Commandments which
have been found substantially common to man¬
kind were merely military commands; a code
of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain
ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil
because it endangered the sanctity. And only
when they made a holy day for God did they
find they had made a holiday for men.

If it be granted that this primary devotion to
a place or thing is a source of creative energy,
we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let us
reiterate for an instant that the only right
optimism is a sort of universal patriotism.
What is the matter with the pessimist ? I
think it can be stated by saying that he is the
cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter
with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated,
without undue bitterness, by saying that he is
the candid friend. And what* is the matter
with the candid friend? There we strike the
rock of real life and immutable human nature.

I venture to say that what is bad in the candid
friend is simply that he is not candid. He is
keeping something back — his own gloomy
pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has
a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help.
This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain
sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens.

124

The Flag of the World

I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism
which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and
gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speak¬
ing plainly. A man who says that no patriot
should attack the Boer War until it is over is
not worth answering intelligently; he is saying
that no good son should warn his mother off a
cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is
an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest
men, and the explanation of him is, I think,
what I have suggested: he is the uncandid
candid friend; the man who says, “I am sorry
to say we are ruined,” and is not sorry at all.
And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a
traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge
which was allowed him to strengthen the army,
to discourage people from joining it. Because
he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military
adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting
sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist
(who is the cosmic anti-patriot) uses the free¬
dom that life allows to her counsellors to lure
away the people from her flag. Granted that
he states only facts, it is still essential to know
what are his emotions, what is his motive. It
may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham
are down with smallpox; but we want to know
whether this is stated by some great philosopher

125

Orthodoxy

who wants to curse the gods, or only by some
common clergyman who wants to help the men.

The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he
chastises gods and men, but that he does not
love what he chastises — he has not this primary
and supernatural loyalty to things. What is
the evil of the man commonly called an opti¬
mist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist,
wishing to defend the honour of this world,
will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo
of the universe; he will say, “My cosmos, right
or wrong.” He will be less inclined to the
reform of things; more inclined to a sort of
front-bench official answer to all attacks, sooth¬
ing every one with assurances. He will not
wash the world, but whitewash the world. All
this (which is true of a type of optimist) leads
us to the one really interesting point of psychol¬
ogy, which could not be explained without it.

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life :
the only question is, shall it be a natural or a
supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so,
shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable
loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that
the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak
defence of everything) comes in with the rea¬
sonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to
stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads

126

The Flag of the World

to reform. Let me explain by using once more
the parallel of patriotism. The man who is
most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly
the man who loves it with a reason. The man
who will improve the place is the man who
loves it without a reason. If a man loves some
feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he
may find himself defending that feature against
Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico
itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the
New Jerusalem. I do not deny that reform
may be excessive ; I only say that it is the mystic
patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-con¬
tentment is commonest among those who have
some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The
worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory
of England. If we love England for being an
empire, we may overrate the success with
which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it
only for being a nation, we can face all events:
for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos
ruled us. Thus also only those will permit
their patriotism to falsify history whose pa¬
triotism depends on history. A man who
loves England for being English will not mind
how she arose. But a man who loves England
for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts
for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and

127

Orthodoxy

Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman
Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end
in utter unreason — because he has a reason.
A man who loves France for being military
will palliate the army of 1870. But a man
who loves France for being France will im¬
prove the army of 1870. This is exactly what
the French have done, and France is a good
instance of the working paradox. Nowhere
else is patriotism more purely abstract and
arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more
drastic and sweeping. The more transcen¬
dental is your patriotism, the more practical
are your politics.

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this
point is in the case of women ; and their strange
and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started
the idea that because women obviously back
up their own people through everything, there¬
fore women are blind and do not see anything.
They can hardly have known any women.
The same women who are ready to defend their
men through thick and thin are (in their per¬
sonal intercourse with the man) almost mor¬
bidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or
the thickness of his head. A man’s friend
likes him but leaves him as he is : his wife loves
him and is always trying to turn him into some-

128

The Flag of the World

body else. Women who are utter mystics in
their creed are utter cynics in their criticism.
Thackeray expressed this well when he made
Pendennis’ mother, who worshipped her son
as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong
as a man. She underrated his virtue, though
she overrated his value. The devotee is en¬
tirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be
a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last
thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more
it is bound the less it is blind.

This at least had come to be my position
about all that was called optimism, pessimism,
and improvement. Before any cosmic act of
reform we must have a cosmic oath of alle¬
giance. A man must be interested in life, then
he could be disinterested in his views of it.
“My son give me thy heart”; the heart must
be fixed on the right thing : the moment we have
a fixed heart we have a free hand. I must
pause to anticipate an obvious criticism. It
will be said that a rational person accepts the
world as mixed of good and evil with a decent
satisfaction and a decent endurance. But this
is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be
defective. It is, I know, very common in this
age ; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of
Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly

129

Orthodoxy

blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopen¬
hauer —

“ Enough we live: — and if a life,

With large results so little rife,

Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth.”

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I
think it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic
purposes of faith and revolution, what we need
is not the cold acceptance of the world as
a compromise, but some way in which we
can heartily hate and heartily love it. We
do not want joy and anger to neutralize each
other and produce a surly contentment; we
want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discon¬
tent. We have to feel the universe at once
as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as
our own cottage, to which we can return at
evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get
on with this world : but we demand not strength
enough to get on with it, but strength enough
to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change
it, and yet love it enough to think it worth
changing ? Can he look up at its colossal
good without once feeling acquiescence? Can
he look up at its colossal evil without once

130

The Flag of the World

feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once
not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a
fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?
Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world,
and enough of a Christian to die to it ? In this
combination, I maintain, it is the rational
optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who
succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole
universe for the sake of itself.

I put these things not in their mature logical
sequence, but as they came: and this view was
cleared and sharpened by an accident of the
time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen,
an argument arose whether it was not a very
nice thing to murder one’s self. Grave mod¬
erns told us that we must not even say “poor
fellow,” of a man who had blown his brains

*

out, since he was an enviable person, and had
only blown them out because of their excep¬
tional excellence. Mr. William Archer even
suggested that in the golden age there would
be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man
could kill himself for a penny. In all this I
found myself utterly hostile to many who called
themselves liberal and humane. Not only is
suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate
and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest
in existence; the refusal to take the oath of

13 1

Orthodoxy

loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills
a man. The man who kills himself, kills all
men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out
the world. His act is worse (symbolically
considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage.
For it destroys all buildings: it insults all
women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds;
but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He
cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of
the Celestial City. The thief compliments the
things he steals, if not the owner of them. But
the suicide insults everything on earth by not
stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing
to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature
in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer.
When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves
might fall off in anger and the birds fly away
in fury: for each has received a personal affront.
Of course there may be pathetic emotional
excuses for the act. There often are for rape,
and there almost always are for dynamite.
But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelli¬
gent meaning of things, then there is much
more rational and philosophic truth in the
burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven
through the body, than in Mr. Archer’s suicidal
automatic machines. There is a meaning in
burying the suicide apart. The man’s crime

132

The Flag of the World

is different from other crimes — for it makes
even crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flip¬
pancy by some free thinker: he said that a
suicide was only the same as a martyr. The
open fallacy of this helped to clear the question.
Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr.
A martyr is a man who cares so much for
something outside him, that he forgets his own
personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so
little for anything outside him, that he wants
to see the last of everything. One wants some¬
thing to begin: the other wants everything to
end. In other words, the martyr is noble,
exactly because (however he renounces the
world or execrates all humanity) he confesses
this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart
outside himself: he dies that something may
live. The suicide is ignoble because he has
not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer;
spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then
I remembered the stake and the cross-roads,
and the queer fact that Christianity had shown
this weird harshness to the suicide. For Chris¬
tianity had shown a wild encouragement of the
martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not
entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom
and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessi-

133

Orthodoxy

mistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of
death with a horrible happiness. They blas¬
phemed the beautiful duties of the body: they
smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.
All this has seemed to many the very poetry of
pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the cross¬
roads to show what Christianity thought of the
pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enig¬
mas with which Christianity entered the dis¬
cussion. And there went with it a peculiarity
of which I shall have to speak more markedly,
as a note of all Christian notions, but which
distinctly began in this one. The Christian
attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not
what is so often affirmed in modern morals.
It was not a matter of degree. It was not that
a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the
self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the
self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The
Christian feeling evidently was not merely that
the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far.
The Christian feeling was furiously for one and
furiously against the other: these two things
that looked so much alike were at opposite
ends of heaven and hell. One man flung
away his life ; he was so good that his dry bones
could heal cities in pestilence. Another man

I34

The Flag of the World

flung away life; he was so bad that his bones
would pollute his brethren’s. I am not saying
this fierceness was right; but why was it so
fierce ?

Here it was that I first found that my wan¬
dering feet were in some beaten track. Chris¬
tianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr
to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the
same reason? Had Christianity felt what I
felt, but could not (and cannot) express — this
need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a
ruinous reform of things? Then I remem¬
bered that it was actually the charge against
Christianity that it combined these two things
which I was wildly trying to combine. Chris¬
tianity was accused, at one and the same time,
of being too optimistic about the universe and
of being too pessimistic about the world. The
coincidence made me suddenly stand still.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern con¬
troversy of saying that such and such a creed
can be held in one age but cannot be held in
another. Some dogma, we are told, was cred¬
ible in the twelfth century, but is not credible
in the twentieth. You might as well say that a
certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays,
but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You
might as well say of a view of the cosmos that

i35

Orthodoxy

it was suitable to half-past three, but not suit¬
able to half-past four. What a man can believe
depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock
or the century. If a man believes in unalter¬
able natural law, he cannot believe in any
miracle in any age. If a man believes in a
will behind law, he can believe in any miracle
in any age. Suppose, for the sake of argument,
we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic
healing. A materialist of the twelfth century
could not believe it any more than a materialist
of the twentieth century. But a Christian
Scientist of the twentieth century can believe
it as much as a Christian of the twelfth cen¬
tury. It is simply a matter of a man’s theory
of things. Therefore in dealing with any his¬
torical answer, the point is not whether it was
given in our time, but whether it was given in
answer to our question. And the more I
thought about when and how Christianity had
come into the world, the more I felt that it
had actually come to answer this question.

It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian
Christians who pay quite indefensible compli¬
ments to Christianity. They talk as if there
had never been any piety or pity until Chris¬
tianity came, a point on which any mediaeval
would have been eager to correct them. They

136

The Flag of the World

represent that the remarkable thing about
Christianity was that it was the first to preach
simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and
sincerity. They will think me very narrow
(whatever that means) if I say that the remark¬
able thing about Christianity was that it was
the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity
was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and
sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for
all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a
riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long
talk. Only the other day I saw in an excellent
weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that
Christianity when stripped of its armour of
dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped
of his armour of bones), turned out to be noth¬
ing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.
Now, if I were to say that Christianity came
into the world specially to destroy the doctrine
of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggera¬
tion. But it would be very much nearer to the
truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius,
were exactly the people who did believe in the
Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness,
their sad external care for others, their incurable
internal care for themselves, were all due to the
Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal
illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius

i37

Orthodoxy

insists, as such introspective moralists always
do, upon small things done or undone; it is
because he has not hate or love enough to make
a moral revolution. He gets up early in the
morning, just as our own aristocrats living the
Simple Life get up early in the morning; be¬
cause such altruism is much easier than stop¬
ping the games of the amphitheatre or giving
the English people back their land. Marcus
Aurelius is the most intolerable of human
types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish
egoist is a man who has pride without the
excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms
of enlightenment the worst is what these people
call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions
the most horrible is the worship of the god
within. Any one who knows any body knows
how it would work; any one who knows any
one from the Higher Thought Centre knows
how it does work. That Jones shall worship
the god within him turns out ultimately to
mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let
Jones worship the sun or moon, anything
rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship
cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his
street, but not the god within. Christianity
came into the world firstly in order to assert
with violence that a man had not only to look

138

The Flag of the World

inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with
astonishment and enthusiasm a divine com¬
pany and a divine captain. The only fun of
being a Christian was that a man was not left
alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recog¬
nized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as
the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

All the same, it will be as well if Jones does
not worship the sun and moon. If he does,
there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to
say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he
may burn insects alive. He thinks that be¬
cause the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may
give his neighbour measles. He thinks that
because the moon is said to drive men mad, he
may drive his wife mad. This ugly side of
mere external optimism had also shown itself
in the ancient world. About the time when
the Stoic idealism had begun to show the weak¬
nesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of
the ancients had begun to show the enormous
weaknesses of optimism. Nature worship is
natural enough while the society is young, or,
in other words, Pantheism is all right as long
as it is the worship of Pan. But Nature has
another side which experience and sin are not
slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say
of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven

i39

Orthodoxy

hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion
is that somehow it always becomes unnatural.
A man loves Nature in the morning for her
innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if
he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and
her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water
as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, some¬
how at the dark end of the day, he is bathing
in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.
The mere pursuit of health always leads to
something unhealthy. Physical nature must
not be made the direct object of obedience; it
must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and
mountains must not be taken seriously. If
they are, we end where the pagan nature wor¬
ship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can
imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is
sane, we can all go mad about sexuality. Mere
optimism had reached its insane and appropri¬
ate termination. The theory that everything
was good had become an orgy of everything
that was bad.

On the other side our idealist pessimists were
represented by the old remnant of the Stoics.
Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really
given up the idea of any god in the universe
and looked only to the god within. They had
no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly

140

The Flag of the World

any hope of any virtue in society. They had
not enough interest in the outer world really to
wreck or revolutionise it. They did not love
the city enough to set fire to it. Thus the
ancient world was exactly in our own desolate
dilemma. The only people who really enjoyed
this world were busy breaking it up; and the
virtuous people did not care enough about
them to knock them down. In this dilemma
(the same as ours) Christianity suddenly stepped
in and offered a singular answer, which the
world eventually accepted as the answer. It
was the answer then, and I think it is the answer
now.

This answer was like the slash of a sword;
it sundered; it did not in any sense sentimen¬
tally unite. Briefly, it divided God from the
cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness
of the deity which some Christians now want
to remove from Christianity, was really the
only reason why any one wanted to be a Chris¬
tian. It was the whole point of the Christian
answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still
more unhappy optimist. As I am here only
concerned with their particular problem, I shall
indicate only briefly this great metaphysical
suggestion. All descriptions of the creating or
sustaining principle in things must be meta-

Orthodoxy

phorical, because they must be verbal. Thus
the pantheist is forced to speak of God in all
things as if he were in a box. Thus the evo¬
lutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being
unrolled like a carpet. All terms, religious and
irreligious, are open to this charge. The only
question is whether all terms are useless, or
whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a
distinct idea about the origin of things. I
think one can, and so evidently does the evo¬
lutionist, or he would not talk about evolution.

'••'■ And the root phrase for all Christian theism
was this, that God was a creator, as an artist
is a creator. A poet is so separate from his
poem that he himself speaks of it as a little
thing he has “thrown off.” Even in giving it
forth he has flung it away. This principle that
all creation and procreation is a breaking off
is at least as consistent through the cosmos as
the evolutionary principle that all growth is a
branching out. A woman loses a child even
in having a child. All creation is separation.
Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of
Christianity that this divorce in the divine act
of making (such as severs the poet from the
poem or the mother from the new-born child)
was the true description of the act whereby the

142

The Flag of the World

absolute energy made the world. According
to most philosophers, God in making the world
enslaved it. According to Christianity, in
making it, He set it free. God had written,
not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play
he had planned as perfect, but which had
necessarily been left to human actors and
stage-managers, who had since made a great
mess of it. I will discuss the truth of this
theorem later. Here I have only to point out
with what a startling smoothness it passed the
dilemma we have discussed in this chapter.
In this way at least one could be both happy
and indignant without degrading one’s self
to be either a pessimist or an optimist. On
this system one could fight all the forces of
existence without deserting the flag of existence.
One could be at peace with the universe and
yet be at war with the world. St. George could
still fight the dragon, however big the monster
bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger
than the mighty cities or bigger than the ever¬
lasting hills. If he were as big as the world he
could yet be killed in the name of the world.
St. George had not to consider any obvious
odds or proportions in the scale of things, but
only the original secret of their design. He
can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is

143

Orthodoxy

everything; even if the empty heavens over his
head are only the huge arch of its open jaws.

And then followed an experience impossible
to describe. It was as if I had been blunder¬
ing about since my birth with two huge and
unmanageable machines, of different shapes
and without apparent connection — the world
and the Christian tradition. I had found this
hole in the world : the fact that one must some¬
how find a way of loving the world without
trusting it; somehow one must love the world
without being worldly. I found this projecting
feature of Christian theology, like a sort of
hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God
was personal, and had made a world separate
from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted
exactly into the hole in the world — it had
evidently been meant to go there — and then
the strange thing began to happen. When
once these two parts of the two machines had
come together, one after another, all the other
parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude.
I could hear bolt after bolt over all the ma¬
chinery falling into its place with a kind of
click of relief. Having got one part right, all
the other parts were repeating that rectitude,
as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct
after instinct was answered by doctrine after

144

The Flag of the World

doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like
one who had advanced into a hostile country
to take one high fortress. And when that fort
had fallen the whole country surrendered and
turned solid behind me. The whole land was
lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my
childhood. All those blind fancies of boyhood
which in the fourth chapter I have tried in
vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly
transparent and sane. I was right when I felt
that roses were red by some sort of choice: it
was the divine choice. I was right when I felt
that I would almost rather say that grass was
the wrong colour than say it must by necessity
have been that colour: it might verily have
been any other. My sense that happiness
hung on the crazy thread of a condition did
mean something when all was said: it meant
the whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those
dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I
have not been able to describe, much less de¬
fend, stepped quietly into their places like
colossal caryatides of the creed. The fancy
that the cosmos was not vast and void, but
small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance
now, for anything that is a work of art must
be small in the sight of the artist; to God the
stars might be only small and dear; like dia-

*45

Orthodoxy

monds. And my haunting instinct that some¬
how good was not merely a tool to be used, but
a relic to be guarded, like the goods from
Crusoe’s ship — even that had been the wild
whisper of something originally wise, for, ac¬
cording to Christianity, we were indeed the
survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship
that had gone down before the beginning of
the world.

But the important matter was this, that it
entirely reversed the reason for optimism. And
the instant the reversal was made it felt like the
abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the
socket. I had often called myself an optimist,
to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessi¬
mism. But all the optimism of the age had
been false and disheartening for this reason,
that it had always been trying to prove that we
fit in to the world. The Christian optimism
is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the
world. I had tried to be happy by telling
myself that man is an animal, like any other
which sought its meat from God. But now I
really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a
monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all
things as odd, for I myself was at once worse
and better than all things. The optimist’s
pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the natural-

146

The Flag of the World

ness of everything; the Christian pleasure was
poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of
everything in the light of the supernatural.
The modem philosopher had told me again
and again that I was in the right place, and I
had still felt depressed even in acquiescence.
But I had heard that I was in the wrong place,
and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
The knowledge found out and illuminated for¬
gotten chambers in the dark house of infancy.
I knew now why grass had always seemed to
me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and
why I could feel homesick at home.

i47

VI — The Paradoxes of Christianity

THE real trouble with this world of
ours is not that it is an unreasonable
world, nor even that it is a reason¬
able one. The commonest kind of
trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not
quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a
trap for logicians. It looks just a little more
mathematical and regular than it is; its exacti¬
tude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden;
its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse
instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathe¬
matical creature from the moon were to reckon
up the human body; he would at once see that
the essential thing about it was that it was
duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right
exactly resembling him on the left. Having
noted that there was an arm on the right and
one on the left, a leg on the right and one on
the left, he might go further and still find on
each side the same number of fingers, the same
number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nos¬
trils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last
he would take it as a law; and then, where he
found a heart on one side, would deduce that

148

The P aradoxes of Christianity

there was another heart on the other. And
just then, where he most felt he was right, he
would be wrong.

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an
inch that is the uncanny element in everything.
It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe.
An apple or an orange is round enough to get
itself called round, and yet is not round after
all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange
in order to lure some simple astronomer into
calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called
after the blade of a sword, because it comes to
a point; but it doesn’t. Everywhere in things
there is this element of the quiet and incal¬
culable. It escapes the rationalists, but it
never escapes till the last moment. From the
grand curve of our earth it could easily be
inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.
It would seem rational that as a man has a
brain on both sides, he should have a heart on
both sides. Yet scientific men are still organiz¬
ing expeditions to find the North Pole, because
they are so fond of flat country. Scientific
men are also still organizing expeditions to
find a man’s heart; and when they try to find
it, they generally get on the wrong side of him.

Now, actual insight or inspiration .is best
tested by whether it guesses these hidden mal-

149

Orthodoxy

formations or surprises. If our mathematician
from the moon saw the two arms and the two
ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades
and the two halves of the brain. But if he
guessed that the man’s heart was in the right
place, then I should call him something more
than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly
the claim which I have since come to propound
for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces
logical truths, but that when it suddenly be¬
comes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an
illogical truth. It not only goes right about
things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so)
exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan
suits the secret irregularities, and expects the
unexpected. It is simple about the simple
truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth.
It will admit that a man has two hands, it will
not admit (though all the Modernists wail to
it) the obvious deduction that he has two
hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter
to point this out; to show that whenever we
feel there is something odd in Christian theol¬
ogy, we shall generally find that there is some¬
thing odd in the truth.

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to
the effect that such and such a creed cannot
be believed in our age. Of course, anything

i5°

The Paradoxes of Christianity

can be believed in any age. But, oddly enough,
there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is
believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in
a complex society than in a simple one. If a
man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he
has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he
had found it true in Mercia. For the more
complicated seems the coincidence, the less it
can be a coincidence. If snowflakes fell in the
shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might
be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the
exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I
think one might call it a miracle. It is exactly
as of such a miracle that I have since come to
feel of the philosophy of Christianity. The
complication of our modern world proves the
truth of the creed more perfectly than any of
the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was
in Notting Hill and Battersea that I began to
see that Christianity was true. This is why
the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and
details which so much distresses those who
admire Christianity without believing in it.
When once one believes in a creed, one is proud
of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the
complexity of science. It shows how rich it is
in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a com¬
pliment to say that it’s elaborately right. A

I5I

Orthodoxy

stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by
accident. But a key and a lock are both com¬
plex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is
the right key.

But this involved accuracy of the thing
makes it very difficult to do what I now have
to do, to describe this accumulation of truth.
It is very hard for a man to defend anything of
which he is entirely convinced. It is compara¬
tively easy when he is only partially convinced.
He is partially convinced because he has found
this or that proof of the thing, and he can
expound it. But a man is not really convinced
of a philosophic theory when he finds that
something proves it. He is only really con¬
vinced when he finds that everything proves it.
And the more converging reasons he finds point¬
ing to this conviction, the more bewildered he
is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if
one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the
spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer
civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly
round at object after object, and would only
be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that
bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle
. . . and pianos . . . and policemen.” The
whole case for civilization is that the case for
it is complex. It has done so many things.

I52

The Paradoxes of Christianity

But that very multiplicity of proof which ought
to make reply overwhelming makes reply im¬
possible.

There is, therefore, about all complete con¬
viction a kind of huge helplessness. The be¬
lief is so big that it takes a long time to get it
into action. And this hesitation chiefly arises,
oddly enough, from an indifference about where
one should begin. All roads lead to Rome;
which is one reason why many people never
get there. In the case of this defence of the
Christian conviction I confess that I would as
soon begin the argument with one thing as
another; I would begin it with a turnip or a
taximeter cab. But if I am to be at all careful
about making my meaning clear, it will, I
think, be wiser to continue the current argu¬
ments of the last chapter, which was concerned
to urge the first of these mystical coincidences,
or rather ratifications. All I had hitherto heard
of Christian theology had alienated me from
it. I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a
complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and I
cannot understand any one passing the age of
seventeen without having asked himself so
simple a question. I did, indeed, retain a
cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great
historical interest in the Founder of Christianity.

i53

Orthodoxy

But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though
perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He
had an advantage over some of His modern
critics. I read the scientific and sceptical liter¬
ature of my time — all of it, at least, that I
could find written in English and lying about;
and I read nothing else ; I mean I read nothing
else on any other note of philosophy. The
penny dreadfuls which I also read were indeed
in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity;
but I did not know this at the time. I never
read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as
little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and
Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought
me back to orthodox theology. They sowed
in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt.
Our grandmothers were quite right when they
said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers un¬
settled the , mind. They do. They unsettled
mine horribly. The rationalist made me ques¬
tion whether reason was of any use whatever;
and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had
got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether
evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down
the last of Colonel Ingersoll’s atheistic lectures
the dreadful thought broke across my mind,
“Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”
I was in a desperate way.

i54

The Paradoxes of Christianity

This odd effect of the great agnostics in
arousing doubts deeper than their own might
be illustrated in many ways. I take only one.
As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or
anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Hux¬
ley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression
grew gradually but graphically upon my mind
— the impression that Christianity must be a
most extraordinary thing. For not only (as
I understood) had Christianity the most flam¬
ing vices, but it had apparently a mystical
talent for combining vices which seemed in¬
consistent with each other. It was attacked
on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.
No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated
that it was too far to the east than another
demonstrated with equal clearness that it was
much too far to the west. No sooner had my
indignation died down at its angular and ag¬
gressive squareness than I was called up again
to notice and condemn its enervating and
sensual roundness. In case any reader has
not come across the thing I mean, I will give
such instances as I remember at random of
this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack.
I give four or five of them; there are fifty more.

Thus, for instance, I was much moved by
the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing

i5S

Orthodoxy

of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still
think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment,
rather agreeable than otherwise ; and fortunately
N nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Chris¬
tianity was, as these people said, a thing purely
pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was
quite prepared to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral.
But the extraordinary thing is this. They did
prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete
satisfaction) that Christianity was too pessi¬
mistic; and then, in Chapter II., they began to
prove to me that it was a great deal too opti¬
mistic. One accusation against Christianity
was that it prevented men, by morbid tears
and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the
bosom of Nature. But another accusation was
that it comforted men with a fictitious provi¬
dence, and put them in a pink-and- white
nursery. One great agnostic asked why Nature
was not beautiful enough, and why it was hard
to be free. Another great agnostic objected
that Christian optimism, “the garment of make-
believe woven by pious hands,” hid from us
the fact that Nature was ugly, and that it was
impossible to be free. One rationalist had
hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare
before another began to call it a fool’s paradise,

The Paradoxes of Christianity

This puzzled me; the charges seemed incon¬
sistent. Christianity could not at once be the
black mask on a white world, and also the white
mask on a black world. The state of the Chris¬
tian could not be at once so comfortable that
he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncom¬
fortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it
falsified human vision it must falsify it one way
or another; it could not wear both green and
rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled on my tongue
with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that
time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the
dreariness of the creed —

“ Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has
grown gray with Thy breath.”

But when I read the same poet’s accounts of
paganism (as in “Atalanta”), I gathered that
the world was, if possible, more gray before the
Galilaean breathed on it than afterwards. The
poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that
life itself was pitch dark. And yet, somehow,
Christianity had darkened it. The very man
who denounced Christianity for pessimism was
himself a pessimist. I thought there must be
something wrong. And it did for one wild
moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those
might not be the very best judges of the rela-

iS7

Orthodoxy

tion of religion to happiness who, by their own
account, had neither one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not con¬
clude hastily that the accusations were false or
the accusers fools. I simply deduced that
Christianity must be something even weirder
and wickeder than they made out. A thing
might have these two opposite vices; but it
must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man
might be too fat in one place and too thin in
another; but he would be an odd shape. At
this point my thoughts were only of the odd
shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege
any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I
felt that a strong case against Christianity lay
in the charge that there is something timid,
monkish, and unmanly about all that is called
“Christian,” especially in its attitude towards
resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of
the nineteenth century were largely virile.
Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a
reticent way, were decidedly men. In com¬
parison, it did seem tenable that there was
something weak and over patient about Chris¬
tian counsels. The Gospel paradox about the
other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a
hundred things made plausible the accusation

158

The Paradoxes of Christianity

that Christianity was an attempt to make a
man too like a sheep. I read it and believed
it, and if I had read nothing different, I should
have gone on believing it. But I read some¬
thing very different. I turned the next page
in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned
up-side down. Now I found that I was to
hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but
for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed,
was the mother of wars. Christianity had
deluged the world with blood. I had got
thoroughly angry with the Christian, because
he never was angry. And now I was told to be
angry with him because his anger had been the
most huge and horrible thing in human history;
because his anger had soaked the earth and
smoked to the sun. The very people who re¬
proached Christianity with the meekness and
non-resistance of the monasteries were the very
people who reproached it also with the violence
and valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of
poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both
that Edward the Confessor did not fight and
that Richard Cceur de Leon did. The Quakers
(we were told) were the only characteristic
Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell
and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes.
What could it all mean ? What was this Chris-

T59

Orthodoxy

tianity which always forbade war and always
produced wars? What could be the nature of
the thing which one could abuse first because
it would not fight, and second because it was
always fighting ? In what world of riddles was
born this monstrous murder and this monstrous
meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a
queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, be¬
cause it involves the one real objection to the
faith. The one real objection to the Christian
religion is simply that it is one religion. The
world is a big place, full of very different kinds
of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be
said) is one thing confined to one kind of people ;
it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped
with Europe. I was duly impressed with this
argument in my youth, and I was much drawn
towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical
Societies — I mean the doctrine that there is
one great unconscious church of all humanity
founded on the omnipresence of the human
conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men;
but at least morals united them. The soul
might seek the strangest and most remote lands
and ages and still find essential ethical common
sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern
trees, and he would be writing ‘'Thou shalt not

160

The Paradoxes of Christianity

steal.” It might decipher the darkest hiero¬
glyphic on the most primeval desert, and the
meaning when deciphered would be “Little
boys should tell the truth.” I believed this
doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the
possession of a moral sense, and I believe it
still — with other things. And I was thor¬
oughly annoyed with Christianity for suggest¬
ing (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires
of men had utterly escaped this light of justice
and reason. But then I found an astonishing
thing. I found that the very people who said
that mankind was one church from Plato to
Emerson were the very people who said that
morality had changed altogether, and that what
was right in one age was wrong in another.
If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we
needed none, for men our brothers gave us
clear oracles and one creed in their universal
customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed
out that one of men’s universal customs was to
have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned
clean round and told me that men had always
been in darkness and the superstitions of sav¬
ages. I found it was their daily taunt against
Christianity that it was the light of one people
and had left all others to die in the dark. But
I also found that it was their special boast for

j6i

Orthodoxy

themselves that science and progress were the
discovery of one people, and that all other
peoples had died in the dark. Their chief
insult to Christianity was actually their chief
compliment to themselves, and there seemed
to be a strange unfairness about all their rela¬
tive insistence on the two things. When con¬
sidering some pagan or agnostic, we were to
remember that all men had one religion; when
considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were
only to consider what absurd religions some
men had. We could trust the ethics of Epic¬
tetus, because ethics had never changed. We
must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because
ethics had changed. They changed in two
hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so
much as if Christianity was bad enough to
include any vices, but rather as if any stick was
good enough to beat Christianity with. What
again could this astonishing thing be like which
people were so anxious to contradict, that in
doing so they did not mind contradicting them¬
selves? I saw the same thing on every side.
I can give no further space to this discussion of
it in detail; but lest any one supposes that I
have unfairly selected three accidental cases I
will run briefly through a few others. Thus,

162

The Paradoxes of Christianity

certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of
Christianity had been its attack on the family;
it had dragged women to the loneliness and
contemplation of the cloister, away from their
homes and their children. But, then, other
sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the
great crime of Christianity was forcing the
family and marriage upon us; that it doomed
women to the drudgery of their homes and
children, and forbade them loneliness and con¬
templation. The charge was actually reversed.
Or, again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the
marriage service, were said by the anti-Chris¬
tians to show contempt for woman’s intellect.
But I found that the anti-Christians themselves
had a contempt for woman’s intellect; for it
was their great sneer at the Church on the
Continent that “only women” went to it. Or
again, Christianity was reproached with its
naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth
and dried peas. But the next minute Chris¬
tianity was being reproached with its pomp and
its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its
robes of gold. It was abused for being too
plain and for being too coloured. Again Chris¬
tianity had always been accused of restraining
sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Mal¬
thusian discovered that it restrained it too little.

163

Orthodoxy

It is often accused in the same breath of prim
respectability and of religious extravagance.
Between the covers of the same atheistic pam¬
phlet I have found the faith rebuked for its dis¬
union, “ One thinks one thing, and one another/’
and rebuked also for its union, “It is difference
of opinion that prevents the world from going
to the dogs.” In the same conversation a
free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Chris¬
tianity for despising Jews, and then despised
it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to
be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that
the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I
only concluded that if Christianity was wrong,
it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile hor¬
rors might be combined in one thing, but that
thing must be very strange and solitary. There
are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts;
but they are rare. There are men sensual and
also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this
mass of mad contradictions really existed,
quakerish and bloodthirsty, too. gorgeous and
too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering pre¬
posterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of
women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessi¬
mist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed,
then there was in this evil something quite

164

The Paradoxes of Christianity

supreme and unique. For I found in my
rationalist teachers no explanation of such
exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoret¬
ically speaking) was in their eyes only one of
the ordinary myths and errors of mortals.
They gave me no key to this twisted and un¬
natural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose
to the stature of the supernatural. It was,
indeed, almost as supernatural as the infalli¬
bility of the Pope. An historic institution,
which never went right, is really quite as much
of a miracle as an institution that cannot go
wrong. The only explanation which imme¬
diately occurred to my mind was that Chris¬
tianity did not come from heaven, but from
hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not
Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought
struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had
suddenly come into my mind another explana¬
tion. Suppose we heard an unknown man
spoken of by many men. Suppose we were
puzzled to hear that some men said he was too
tall and some too short; some objected to his
fatness, some lamented his leanness; some
thought him too dark, and some too fair. One
explanation (as has been already admitted)
would be that he might be an odd shape. But

*65

Orthodoxy

there is another explanation. He might be the
right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel
him to be short. Very short men might feel
him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing
stout might consider him insufficiently filled
out; old beaux who were growing thin might
feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines
of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale
hair like tow) called him a dark man, while
negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Per¬
haps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really
the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing,
the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity
that is sane and all its critics that are mad —
in various ways. I tested this idea by asking
myself whether there was about any of the
accusers anything morbid that might explain
the accusation. I was startled to find that this
key fitted a lock. For instance, it was cer¬
tainly odd that the modern world charged
Christianity at once with bodily austerity and
with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd,
very odd, that the modern world itself com¬
bined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme
absence of artistic pomp. The modern man
thought Becket’s robes too rich and his meals
too poor. But then the modern man was really
exceptional in history; no man before ever ate

166

The Paradoxes of Christianity

such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes.
The modern man found the church too simple
exactly where modem life is too complex; he
found the church too gorgeous exactly where
modern life is too dingy. The man who dis¬
liked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on
entrees. The man who disliked vestments wore
a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if
there was any insanity involved in the matter
at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply
falling robe. If there was any insanity at all,
it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the
bread and wine.

I went over all the cases, and I found the
key fitted so far. The fact that Swinburne was
irritated at the unhappiness of Christians and
yet more irritated at their happiness was easily
explained. It was no longer a complication of
diseases in Christianity, but a complication of
diseases in Swinburne. The restraints of Chris¬
tians saddened him simply because he was
more hedonist than a healthy man should be.
The faith of Christians angered him because
he was more pessimist than a healthy man
should be. In the same way the Malthu-
sians by instinct attacked Christianity; not
because there is anything especially anti-Mal-
thusian about Christianity, but because there

167

Orthodoxy

is something a little anti-human about Mal¬
thusianism.

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite
true that Christianity was merely sensible and
stood in the middle. There was really an
element in it of emphasis and even frenzy
which had justified the secularists in their
superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began
more and more to think that it was wise, but it
was not merely worldly wise ; it was not merely
temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders
and meek saints might balance each other; still,
the crusaders were very fierce and the saints
were very meek, meek beyond all decency.
Now, it was just at this point of the speculation
that I remembered my. thoughts about the
martyr and the suicide. In that matter there
had been this combination between two almost
insane positions which yet somehow amounted
to sanity. This was just such another contra¬
diction; and this I had already found to be
true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in
which sceptics found the creed wrong; and in
this I had found it right. Madly as Christians
might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they
never felt these passions more madly than I
had felt them long before I dreamed of Chris¬
tianity. Then the most difficult and interesting

1 68

The Paradoxes of Christianity

part of the mental process opened, and I began
to trace this idea darkly through all the enor¬
mous thoughts of our theology. The idea was
that which I had outlined touching the optimist
and the pessimist; that we want not an amal¬
gam or compromise, but both things at the top
of their energy; love and wrath both burning.
Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics.
But I need not remind the reader that the idea
of this combination is indeed central in ortho¬
dox theology. For orthodox theology has spe¬
cially insisted that Christ was not a being apart
from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being
half human and half not, like a centaur, but
both things at once and both things thoroughly,
very man and very God. Now let me trace
this notion as I found it.

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind
of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat
too much, or mad and eat too little. Some
moderns have indeed appeared with vague
versions of progress and evolution which seeks
to destroy the yeadv or balance of Aristotle.
They seem to suggest that we are meant to
starve progressively, or to go on eating larger
and larger breakfasts every morning for ever.
But the great truism of the iiecrov remains for
all thinking men, and these people have not

169

Orthodoxy

upset any balance except their own. But
granted that we have all to keep a balance, the
real interest comes in with the question of how
that balance can be kept. That was the prob¬
lem which Paganism tried to solve: that was
the problem which I think Christianity solved
and solved in a very strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a
balance; Christianity declared it was in a con¬
flict: the collision of two passions apparently
opposite. Of course they were not really in¬
consistent; but they were such that it was hard
to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a
moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide;
and take the case of courage. No quality has
ever so much addled the brains and tangled
the definitions of merely rational sages. Cour¬
age is almost a contradiction in terms. It
means a strong desire to live taking the form
of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his
life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of
mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece
of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers.
It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a
drill book. This paradox is the whole prin¬
ciple of courage; even of quite earthly or quite
brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may
save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

170

The Paradoxes of Christianity

He can only get away from death by continu¬
ally stepping within an inch of it. A soldier
surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way
out, needs to combine a strong desire for living
with a strange carelessness about dying. He
must not merely cling to life, for then he will
be a coward, and will not escape. He must
not merely wait for death, for then he will be a
suicide, and will not escape. He must seek
his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it;
he must desire life like water and yet drink
death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has
ever expressed this romantic riddle with ade¬
quate lucidity, and I certainly have not done
so. But Christianity has done more: it has
marked the limits of it in the awful graves of
the suicide and the hero, showing the distance
between him who dies for the sake of living
and him who dies for the sake of dying. And
it has held up ever since above the European
lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry:
the Christian courage, which is a disdain of
death; not the Chinese courage, which is a
disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex
passion was the Christian key to ethics every¬
where. Everywhere the creed made a modera¬
tion out of the still crash of two impetuous

171

Orthodoxy

emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of
modesty, of the balance between mere pride
and mere prostration. The average pagan,
like the average agnostic, would merely say
that he was content with himself, but not inso¬
lently self-satisfied, that there were many better
and many worse, that his deserts were limited,
but he would see that he got them. In short,
he would walk with his head in the air ; but not
necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a
manly and rational position, but it is open to
the objection we noted against the compromise
between optimism and pessimism — the “resig¬
nation” of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture
of two things, it is a dilution of two things;
neither is present in its full strength or con¬
tributes its full colour. This proper pride does
not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets;
you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this.
On the other hand, this mild rationalist mod¬
esty does not cleanse the soul with fire and
make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a
strict and searching humility) make a man as
a little child, who can sit at the feet of the
grass. It does not make him look up and see
marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to
be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both
the poetry of being proud and the poetry of

172

The Paradoxes of Christianity

being humble. Christianity sought by this
same strange expedient to save both of them.

It separated the two ideas and then exag¬
gerated them both. In one way Man was to
be haughtier than he had ever been before; in
another way he was to be humbler than he had
ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am
the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man
I am the chief of sinners. All humility that
had meant pessimism, that had meant man
taking a vague or mean view of his whole
destiny — all that was to go. We were to hear
no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity
had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the
awful cry of Homer that man was only the
saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was
a statue of God walking about the garden.
Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes;
man was only sad because he was not a beast,
but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of
men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it.
Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to
subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought
of the dignity of man that could only be ex¬
pressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans
of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it
could hold a thought about the abject small¬
ness of man that could only be expressed in

173

Orthodoxy

fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray
ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of
St. Bernard. When one came to think of.
one’s self, there was vista and void enough for
any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter
truth. There the realistic gentleman could let
himself go — as long as he let himself go at
himself. There was an open playground for
the happy pessimist. Let him say anything
against himself short of blaspheming the orig¬
inal aim of his being; let him call himself a
fool and even a damned fool (though that is
Calvinistic) ; but he must not say that fools are
not worth saving. He must not say that a
man, qud man, can be valueless. Here, again
in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of
combining furious opposites, by keeping them
both, and keeping them both furious. The
Church was positive on both points. One can
hardly think too little of one’s self. One can
hardly think too much of one’s soul.

Take another case: the complicated question
of charity, which some highly uncharitable
idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is
a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated
baldly, charity certainly means one of two
things — pardoning unpardonable acts, or lov¬
ing unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves

J74

The Paradoxes of Christianity

(as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible
pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall
probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A
sensible pagan would say that there were some
people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t:
a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a
slave who betrayed his benefactor could be
killed, and cursed even after he was killed.
In so far as the act was pardonable, the man
was pardonable. That again is rational, and
even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves
no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as
that which is a great beauty in the innocent.
And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for
men as men, such as is the whole fascination
of the charitable. Christianity came in here
as before. It came in startlingly with a sword,
and clove one thing from another. It divided
the crime from the criminal. The criminal we
must forgive unto seventy times seven. The
crime we must not forgive at all. It was not
enough that slaves who stole wine inspired
partly anger and partly kindness. We must
be much more angry with theft than before,
and yet much kinder to thieves than before.
There was room for wrath and love to run wild.
And the more I considered Christianity, the
more I found that while it had established a

i75

Orthodoxy

rule and order, the chief aim of that order was
to give room for good things to run wild.

Mental and emotional liberty are not so
simple as they look. Really they require almost
as careful a balance of laws and conditions as
do social and political liberty. The ordinary
aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel every¬
thing freely gets knotted at last in a paradox
that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks
away from home limits to follow poetry. But
in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to
feel the “Odyssey.” He is free from national
prejudices and outside patriotism. But being
outside patriotism he is outside “Henry V.”
Such a literary man is simply outside all liter¬
ature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.
For if there is a wall between you and the world,
it makes little difference whether you describe
yourself as locked in or as locked out. What
we want is not the universality that is outside
all normal sentiments; we want the universality
that is inside all normal sentiments. It is all
the difference between being free from them,
as a man is free from a prison, and being free
of them as a man is free of a city. I am free
from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly
detained there), but I am by no means free of
that building. How can man be approxi-

176

The Paradoxes of Christianity

mately free of fine emotions, able to swing
them in a clear space without breakage or
wrong? This was the achievement of this
Christian paradox of the parallel passions.
Granted the primary dogma of the war be¬
tween divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin
of the world, their optimism and pessimism,
as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a
more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman.
St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint
the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both
passions were free because both were kept in
their place. The optimist could pour out all
the praise he liked on the gay music of the
march, the golden trumpets, and the purple
banners going into battle. But he must not
call the fight needless. The pessimist might
draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches
or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call
the fight hopeless. So it was with all the other
moral problems, with pride, with protest, and
with compassion. By defining its main doc¬
trine, the Church not only kept seemingly in¬
consistent things side by side, but, what was
more, allowed them to break out in a sort of
artistic violence otherwise possible only to
anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic

m

Orthodoxy

than madness. Historic Christianity rose into
a high and strange coup de theatre of morality
— things that are to virtue what the crimes of
Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation
and of charity took terrible and attractive
forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness
that scourged like a dog the first and greatest
of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St.
Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed
the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could
be acted as well as composed. This heroic
and monumental manner in ethics has entirely
vanished with supernatural religion. They,
being humble, could parade themselves: but
we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical
teachers write reasonably for prison reform;
but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or
any eminent philanthropist, go into Reading
Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before
it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical
teachers write mildly against the power of
millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr.
Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly
whipped in Westminster Abbey.

Thus, the double charges of the secularists,
though throwing nothing but darkness and
confusion on themselves, throw a real light on
the faith. It is true that the historic Church

178

The Paradoxes of Christianity

has at once emphasised celibacy and empha¬
sised the family; has at once (if one may put it
so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely
for not having children. It has kept them side
by side like two strong colours, red and white,
like the red and white upon the shield of St.
George. It has always had a healthy hatred
of pink. It hates that combination of two
colours which is the feeble expedient of the
philosophers. It hates that evolution of black
into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray.
In fact, the whole theory of the Church on
virginity might be symbolized in the statement
that white is a colour: not merely the absence
of a colour. All that I am urging here can be
expressed by saying that Christianity sought in
most of these cases to keep two colours co¬
existent but pure. It is not a mixture like
russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for
a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in
the pattern of the cross.

So it is also, of course, with the contradictory
charges of the anti-Christians about submission
and slaughter. It is true that the Church told
some men to fight and others not to fight; and
it is true that those who fought were like thun¬
derbolts and those who did not fight were like
statues. All this simply means that the Church

179

Orthodoxy

preferred to use its Supermen and to use its
Tolstoyans. There must be some good in the
life of battle, for so many good men have en¬
joyed being soldiers. There must be some
good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many
good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All
that the Church did (so far as that goes) was
to prevent either of these good things from
ousting the other. They existed side by side.
The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples of
monks, simply became monks. The Quakers
became a club instead of becoming a sect.
Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of
battles and the vanity of revenge. But the
Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run
the whole world; and in the ages of faith they
were not allowed to run it. The world did not
lose the last charge of Sir James Douglas or
the banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes
this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness
met and justified their juncture; the paradox
of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the
soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the
lamb. But remember that this text is too
lightly interpreted. It is constantly assured,
especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that
when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion

180

The P aradoxes of Christianity

becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexa¬
tion and imperialism on the part of the lamb.
That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion
instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real
problem is — /Can the lion lie down with the
lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That
is the problem the Church attempted; that is
the miracle she achieved.

This is what I have called guessing the
hidden eccentricities of life. This is knowing
that a man’s heart is to the left and not in the
middle. This is knowing not only that the
earth is round, but knowing exactly where it is
flat. Christian doctrine detected the oddities
of life. It not only discovered the law, but it
foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Chris¬
tianity who say that it discovered mercy; any
one might discover mercy. In fact every one
did. But to discover a plan for being merciful
and also severe — that was to anticipate a
strange need of human nature. For no one
wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a
little one. Any one might say that we should
be neither quite miserable nor quite happy.
But to find out how far one may be quite mis¬
erable without making it impossible to be quite
happy — that was a discovery in psychology.
Any one might say, “Neither swagger nor

181

Orthodoxy

grovel”; and it would have been a limit.
But to say, “Here you can swagger and
there you can grovel” — that was an eman¬
cipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics;
the discovery of the new balance. Paganism
had been like a pillar of marble, upright be¬
cause proportioned with symmetry. Chris¬
tianity was like a huge and ragged and
romantic rock, which, though it sways on its
pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated
excrescences exactly balance each other, is
enthroned there for a thousand years. In a
Gothic cathedral the columns were all different,
but they were all necessary. Every support
seemed an accidental and fantastic support;
every buttress was a flying buttress. So in
Christendom apparent accidents balanced.
Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and
crimson, and there is much to be said for the com¬
bination; for Becket got the benefit of the
hair shirt while the people in the street got the
benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least
better than the manner of the modern million¬
aire, who has the black and the drab outwardly
for others, and the gold next his heart. But
the balance was not always in one man’s body
as in Becket’s; the balance was often distrib-

182

The Paradoxes of Christianity

uted over the whole body of Christendom.
Because a man prayed and fasted on the North¬
ern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival
in the Southern cities; and because fanatics
drank water on the sands of Syria, men could
still drink cider in the orchards of England.
This is what makes Christendom at once so
much more perplexing and so much more
interesting than the Pagan empire; just as
Amiens Cathedral is not better but more inter¬
esting than the Parthenon. If any one wants
a modem proof of all this, let him consider the
curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe
(while remaining a unity) has broken up into
individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect
example of this deliberate balancing of one
emphasis against another emphasis. The in¬
stinct of the Pagan empire would have said,
“You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow
alike; let the German grow less slow and rev¬
erent; the Frenchmen less experimental and
swift.” But the instinct of Christian Europe
says, “Let the German remain slow and rev¬
erent, that the Frenchman may the more safely
be swift and experimental. We will make an
equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity
called Germany shall correct the insanity called
France.”

183

Orthodoxy

Last and most important, it is exactly this
which explains what is so inexplicable to all the
modern critics of the history of Christianity.
I mean the monstrous wars about small points
of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about
a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of
an inch;' but an inch is everything when you
are balancing. The Church could not afford
to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if
she was to continue her great and daring ex¬
periment of the irregular equilibrium. Once
let one idea become less powerful and some
other idea would become too powerful. It was
no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was
leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of
terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each
one of them strong enough to turn to a false
religion and lay waste the world. Remember
that the Church went in specifically for danger¬
ous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of
birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a
divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the
fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any
one can see, need but a touch to turn them
into something blasphemous or ferocious. The
smallest link was let drop by the artificers of
the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral
pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten

184

The Paradoxes of Christianity

forests of the north. Of these theological
equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here
it is enough to notice that if some small mis¬
take were made in doctrine, huge blunders
might be made in human happiness. A
sentence phrased wrong about the nature of
symbolism would have broken all the best
statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions
might stop all the dances; might wither all
the Christmas trees or break all the Easter
eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict
limits, even in order that man might enjoy
general human liberties. The Church had to
be careful, if only that the world might be
careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speak¬
ing of orthodoxy as something heavy, hum¬
drum, and safe. There never was anything so
perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was
sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than
to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man
behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop
this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude *
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy
of arithmetic. The Church in its early days
went fierce and fast with any warhorse ; yet it is
utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went

185

Orthodoxy

mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.
She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to
avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the
worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly.
The next instant she was swerving to avoid an
orientalism, which would have made it too un¬
worldly. The orthodox Church never took the
tame course or accepted the conventions; the
orthodox Church was never respectable. It
would have been easier to have accepted the
earthly power of the Arians. It would have
been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth cen¬
tury, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestina¬
tion. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to
be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age
have its head ; the difficult thing is to keep one’s
own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as
it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any
of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect
set along the historic path of Christendom —
that would indeed have been simple. It is
always simple to fall; there are an infinity of
angles at which one falls, only one at which
one stands. To have fallen into any one of
the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science
would indeed have been obvious and tame.

1 86

The Paradoxes of Christianity

But to have avoided them all has been one
whirling adventure ; and in my vision the
heavenly chariot flies thundering through the
ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.

187

VII — The Eternal Revolution

THE following propositions have been
urged: First, that some faith in our
life is required even to improve it;
second, that some dissatisfaction with
things as they are is necessary even in order to
be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary
content and necessary discontent it is not suffi¬
cient to have the obvious equilibrium of the
Stoic. For mere resignation has neither the
gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb in¬
tolerance of pain. There is a vital objection
to the advice merely to grin and bear it. The
objection is that if you merely bear it, you do
not grin. Greek heroes do not grin: but gar¬
goyles do — because they are Christian. And
when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most
exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure
is frightful. Christ prophesied the whole of
Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous
and respectable people (such people as now
object to barrel organs) objected to the shout¬
ing of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said,
“If these were silent, the very stones would cry
out.” Under the impulse of His spirit arose

1 88

The Eternal Revolution

like a clamorous chorus the facades of the
mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting
faces and open mouths. The prophecy has
fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.

If these things be conceded, though only for
argument, we may take up where we left it the
thread of the thought of the natural man, called
by the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity),
“The Old Man.” We can ask the next ques¬
tion so obviously in front of us. Some satis¬
faction is needed even to make things better.
But what do we mean by making things better?
Most modern talk on this matter is a mere
argument in a circle — that circle which we
have already made the symbol of madness and
of mere rationalism. Evolution is only good
if it produces good ; good is only good if it helps
evolution. The elephant stands on the tor¬
toise, and the tortoise on the elephant.

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal
from the principle in nature; for the simple
reason that (except for some human or divine
theory), there is no principle in nature. For
instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will
tell you solemnly that there is no equality in
nature. He is right, but he does not see the
logical addendum. There is no equality in
nature; also there is no inequality in nature.

189

Orthodoxy

Inequality, as much as equality, implies a
standard of value. To read aristocracy into
the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental
as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy
and democracy are human ideals: the one say¬
ing that all men are valuable, the other that
some men are more valuable. But nature does
not say that cats are more valuable than mice;
nature makes no remark on the subject. She
does not even say that the cat is enviable or the
mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior
because we have (or most of us have) a particu¬
lar philosophy to the effect that life is better
than death. But if the mouse were a German
pessimist mouse, he might not think that the
cat had beaten him at all. He might think he
had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first.
Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted
frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him
alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of
spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse
might exult to think that he was renewing in
the cat the torture of conscious existence. It
all depends on the philosophy of the mouse.
You cannot even say that there is victory or
superiority in nature unless you have some
doctrine about what things are superior. You
cannot even say that the cat scores unless there

190

I

The Eternal Revolution

is a system of scoring. You cannot even say
that the cat gets the best of it unless there is
some best to be got.

We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from
nature, and as we follow here the first and
natural speculation, we will leave out (for the
present) the idea of getting it from God.
We must have our own vision. But the at¬
tempts of most moderns to express it are highly
vague.

Some fall back simply on the clock: they
talk as if mere passage through time brought
some superiority; so that even a man of the
first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase
that human morality is never up to date. How
can anything be up to date? — a date has no
character. How can one say that Christmas
celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth
of a month ? What the writer meant, of course,
was that the majority is behind his favourite
minority — or in front of it. Other vague
modern people take refuge in material meta¬
phors; in fact, this is the chief mark of vague
modern people. Not daring to define their
doctrine of what is good, they use physical
figures of speech without stint or shame, and,
what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap
analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior

Orthodoxy

to the old morality. Thus they think it intel¬
lectual to talk about things being “high.” It
is at least the reverse of intellectual ; it is a mere
phrase from a steeple or a weathercock.
“Tommy was a good boy” is a pure philo¬
sophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas.
“Tommy lived the higher life” is a gross meta¬
phor from a ten-foot rule.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weak¬
ness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing
as a bold and strong thinker. No one will
deny that he was a poetical and suggestive
thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong.
He was not at all bold. He never put his own
meaning before himself in bald abstract words:
as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl
Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought.
Nietzsche always escaped a question by a
physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet.
He said, “beyond good and evil,” because he
had not the courage to say, “more good than
good and evil,” or, “more evil than good and
evil.” Had he faced his thought without meta¬
phors, he would have seen that it was non¬
sense. So, when he describes his hero, he does
not dare to say, “the purer man,” or “the
happier man,” or “the sadder man,” for all
these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He

192

The Eternal Revolution

says “the upper man,” or “over man,” a phys¬
ical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He
does not really know in the least what sort of
man he wants evolution to produce. And if
he does not know, certainly the ordinary evo¬
lutionists, who talk about things being “higher,”
do not know either.

Then again, some people fall back on sheer
submission and sitting still. Nature is going
to do something some day; nobody knows what,
and nobody knows when. We have no reason
for acting, and no reason for not acting. If
anything happens it is right: if anything is
prevented it was wrong. Again, some people
try to anticipate nature by doing something,
by doing anything. Because we may possibly
grow wings they cut off their legs. Yet nature
may be trying to make them centipedes for all
they know.

Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who
take whatever it is that they happen to want,
and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolu¬
tion. And these are the only sensible people.
This is the only really healthy way with the
word evolution, to work for what you want,
and to call that evolution. The only intelligible
sense that progress or advance can have among

i93

Orthodoxy

men, is that we have a definite vision, and that
we wish to make the whole world like that
vision. If you like to put it so, the essence of
the doctrine is that what we have around us is
the mere method and preparation for some¬
thing that we have to create. This is not a
world, but rather the material for a world.
God has given us not so much the colours of a
picture as the colours of a palette. But he has
also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision.
We must be clear about what we want to paint.
This adds a further principle to our previous
list of principles. We have said we must be
fond of this world, even in order to change it.
We now add that we must be fond of another
world (real or imaginary) in order to have
something to change it to.

We need not debate about the mere words
evolution or progress: personally I prefer to call
it reform. For reform implies form. It im¬
plies that we are trying to shape the world in a
particular image; to make it something that we
see already in our minds. Evolution is a meta¬
phor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress
is a metaphor from merely walking along a
road — very likely the wrong road. But re¬
form is a metaphor for reasonable and deter¬
mined men: it means that we see a certain

194

The Eternal Revolution

thing out of shape and we mean to put it into
shape. And we know what shape.

Now here comes in the whole collapse and
huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up
two different things, two opposite things. Pro¬
gress should mean that we are always changing
the world to suit the vision. Progress does
mean (just now) that we are always changing
the vision. It should mean that we are slow
but sure in bringing justice and mercy among
men: it does mean that we are very swift in
doubting the desirability of justice and mercy:
a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes
men doubt it. Progress should mean that we
are always walking towards the New Jeru¬
salem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem
is always walking away from us. We are not
altering the real to suit the ideal. We are
altering the ideal : it is easier.

Silly examples are always simpler; let us
suppose a man wanted a particular kind of
world; say, a blue world. He would have no
cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness
of his task ; he might toil for a long time at the
transformation; he could work away (in every
sense) until all was blue. He could have
heroic adventures; the putting of the last
touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy

I95

Orthodoxy

dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he
worked harm, that high-minded reformer would
certainly (from his own point of view) leave the
world better and bluer than he found it. If he
altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour
every day, he would get on slowly. But if he
altered his favourite colour every day, he would
not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh
philosopher, he started to paint everything red
or yellow, his work would be thrown away:
there would be nothing to show except a few
blue tigers walking about, specimens of his
early bad manner. This is exactly the position
of the average modern thinker. It will be said
that this is avowedly a preposterous example.
But it is literally the fact of recent history.
The great and grave changes in our political
civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth
century, not to the later. They belonged to the
black and white epoch when men believed
fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Cal¬
vinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in
Revolution. And whatever each man believed
in he hammered at steadily, without scepticism:
and there was a time when the Established
Church might have fallen, and the House of
Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals
were wise enough to be constant and consistent ;

196

The Eternal Revolution

it was because Radicals were wise enough to be
Conservative. But in the existing atmosphere
there is not enough time and tradition in Radi¬
calism to pull anything down. There is a great
deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil’s suggestion
(made in a fine speech) that the era of change is
over, and that ours is an era of conservation and
repose. But probably it would pain Lord
Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the
case) that ours is only an age of conservation
because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let
beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish
institutions to remain the same. The more the
life of the mind is unhinged, the more the ma¬
chinery of matter will be left to itself. The net
result of all our political suggestions, Collecti¬
vism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Commun¬
ism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy — the
plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy
and the House of Lords will remain. The net
result of all the new religions will be that the
Church of England will not (for heaven knows
how long) be disestablished. It was Karl
Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Gra-
hame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert,
who between them, with bowed gigantic backs,
bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Can¬
terbury.

197

Orthodoxy

We may say broadly that free thought is the
best of all the safeguards against freedom.
Managed in a modem style the emancipation
of the slave’s mind is the best way of prevent¬
ing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him
to worry about whether he wants to be free,
and he will not free himself. Again, it may be
said that this instance is remote or extreme.
But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the
streets around us. It is true that the negro
slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably
have either a human affection of loyalty, or a
human affection for liberty. But the man we
see every day — the worker in Mr. Gradgrind’s
factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind’s office
— he is too mentally worried to believe in free¬
dom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary
literature. He is calmed and kept in his place
by a constant succession of wild philosophies.
He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the
next day, a Superman (probably) the next day;
and a slave every day. The only thing that
remains after all the philosophies is the factory.
The only man who gains by all the philosophies
is Gradgrind. It would be worth his while to
keep his commercial helotry supplied with
sceptical literature. And now I come to think
of it, of course, Gradgrind is famous for giving

198

The Eternal Revolution

libraries. He shows his sense. All modem
books are on his side. As long as the vision
of heaven is always changing, the vision of
earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will
remain long enough to be realized, or even
partly realized. The modem young man will
never change his environment; for he will
always change his mind.

This, therefore, is our first requirement about
the ideal towards which progress is directed;
it must be fixed. Whistler used to make many
rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he
tore up twenty portraits. But it would matter
if he looked up twenty times, and each time
saw a new person sitting placidly for his por¬
trait. So it does not matter (comparatively
speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate
its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful.
But it does frightfully matter how often hu¬
manity changes its ideal; for then all its old
failures are fruitless. The question therefore
becomes this: How can we keep the artist dis¬
contented with his pictures while preventing
him from being vitally discontented with his
art? How can we make a man always dis¬
satisfied with his work, yet always satisfied
with working? How can we make sure that
the portrait painter will throw the portrait out

199

Orthodoxy

of window instead of taking the natural and
more human course of throwing the sitter out
of window?

A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling;
it is also necessary for rebelling. This fixed
and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of
revolution. Man will sometimes act slowly
upon new ideas; but he will only act swiftly
upon old ideas. If I am merely to float or
fade or evolve, it may be towards something
anarchic; but if I am to riot, it must be for
something respectable. This is the whole weak¬
ness of certain schools of progress and moral
evolution. They suggest that there has been a
slow movement towards morality, with an im¬
perceptible ethical change in every year or at
every instant. There is only one great dis¬
advantage in this theory. It talks of a slow
movement towards justice; but it does not
permit a swift movement. A man is not
allowed to leap up and declare a certain state
of things to be intrinsically intolerable. To
make the matter clear, it is better to take a
specific example. Certain of the idealistic
vegetarians, such as Mr. Salt, say that the time
has now come for eating no meat; by implica¬
tion they assume that at one time it was right
to eat meat, and they suggest (in words that

200

The Eternal Revolution

could be quoted) that some day it may be wrong
to eat milk and eggs. I do not discuss here
the question of what is justice to animals. I
only say that whatever is justice ought, under
given conditions, to be prompt justice. If an
animal is wronged, we ought to be able to rush
to his rescue. But how can we rush if we are,
perhaps, in advance of our time? How can
we rush to catch a train which may not arrive
for a few centuries? How can I denounce a
man for skinning cats, if he is only now what I
may possibly become in drinking a glass of
milk ? A splendid and insane Russian sect
ran about taking all the cattle out of all the
carts. How can I pluck up courage to take
the horse out of my hansom-cab, when I do not
know whether my evolutionary watch is only a
little fast or the cabman’s a little slow? Sup¬
pose I say to a sweater, “Slavery suited one
stage of evolution.” And suppose he answers,
“And sweating suits this stage of evolution.”
How can I answer if there is no eternal test?
If sweaters can be behind the current morality,
why should not philanthropists be in front of
it? What on earth is the current morality,
except in its literal sense — the morality that
is always running away?

Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is

201

Orthodoxy

as necessary to the innovator as to the con¬
servative; it is necessary whether we wish the
king’s orders to be promptly executed or whether
we only wish the king to be promptly executed.
The guillotine has many sins, but to do it
justice there is nothing evolutionary about it.
The favourite evolutionary argument finds its
best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says,
“Where do you draw the line?” the Revolu¬
tionist answers, “I draw it here: exactly be¬
tween your head and body.” There must at
any given moment be an abstract right and
wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must
be something eternal if there is to be anything
sudden. Therefore for all intelligible human
purposes, for altering things or for keeping
things as they are, for founding a system for
ever, as in China, or for altering it every month
as in the early French Revolution, it is equally
necessary that the vision should be a fixed
vision. This is our first requirement.

When I had written this down, I felt once
again the presence of something else in the dis¬
cussion: as a man hears a church bell above
the sound of the street. Something seemed to
be saying, “My ideal at least is fixed; for it
was fixed before the foundations of the world.
My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be

202

The Eternal Revolution

altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter
the place to which you are going; but you cannot
alter the place from which you have come.
To the orthodox there must always be a case
for revolution; for in the hearts of men God
has been put under the feet of Satan. In the
upper world hell once rebelled against heaven.
But in this world heaven is rebelling against
hell. For the orthodox there can always be a
revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.
At any instant you may strike a blow for the
perfection which no man has seen since Adam.
No unchanging custom, no changing evolution
can make the original good any thing but good.
Man may have had concubines as long as
cows have had horns: still they are not a part
of him if they are sinful. Men may have been
under oppression ever since fish were under
water; still they ought not to be, if oppression
is sinful. The chain may seem as natural to
the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does the
plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox;
still they are not, if they are sinful. I lift my
prehistoric legend to defy all your history.
Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact.”
I paused to note the new coincidence of Chris¬
tianity: but I passed on.

I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal

203

Orthodoxy

of progress. Some people (as we have said)
seem to believe in an automatic and impersonal
progress in the nature of things. But it is
clear that no political activity can be encour¬
aged by saying that progress is natural and
inevitable ; that is not a reason for being active,
but rather a reason for being lazy. If we are
bound to improve, we need not trouble to
improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the
best of all reasons for not being a progressive.
But it is to none of these obvious comments
that I wish primarily to call attention.

The only arresting point is this: that if we
suppose improvement to be natural, it must be
fairly simple. The world might conceivably be
working towards one consummation, but hardly
towards any particular arrangement of many
qualities. To take our original simile: Nature
by herself may be growing more blue; that is,
a process so simple that it might be imper¬
sonal. But Nature cannot be making a careful
picture made of many picked colours, unless
Nature is personal. If the end of the world
were mere darkness or mere light it might
come as slowly and inevitably as dusk or dawn.
But if the end of the world is to be a piece of
elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there
must be design in it, either human or divine.

204

The Eternal Revolution

The world, through mere time, might grow
black like an old picture, or white like an old
coat; but if it is turned into a particular piece
of black and white art — then there is an artist.

If the distinction be not evident, I give an
ordinary instance. We constantly hear a par¬
ticularly cosmic creed from the modern humani¬
tarians; I use the word humanitarian in the
ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds
the claims of all creatures against those of
humanity. They suggest that through the
ages we have been growing more and more
humane, that is to say, that one after another,
groups or sections of beings, slaves, children,
women, cows, or what not, have been gradually
admitted to mercy or to justice. They say
that we once thought it right to eat men (we
didn’t) ; but I am not here concerned with their
history, which is highly unhistorical. As a fact,
anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing,
not a primitive one. It is much more likely
that modern men will eat human flesh out of
affectation than that primitive man ever ate
it out of ignorance. I am here only following
the outlines of their argument, which consists
in maintaining that man has been progressively
more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves,
then to animals, and then (presumably) to

205

Orthodoxy

plants. I think it wrong to sit on a man.
Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse
Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong
to sit on a chair. That is the drive of the
argument. And for this argument it can be
said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of
evolution or inevitable progress. A perpetual
tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might
— one feels, be a mere brute unconscious ten¬
dency, like that of a species to produce fewer
and fewer children. This drift may be really
evolutionary, because it is stupid.

Darwinism can be used to back up two mad
moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a
single sane one. The kinship and competition
of all living creatures can be used as a reason
for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental ;
but not for a healthy love of animals. On the
evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or
you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot
be human. That you and a tiger are one may
be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it
may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger.
It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you,
it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in
neither case does evolution tell you how to treat
a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes
while avoiding his claws.

206

The Eternal Revolution

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you
must go back to the garden of Eden. For the
obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the
supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature.
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism,
and modem cosmic religion is really in this
proposition: that Nature is our mother. Un¬
fortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother,
you discover that she is a step-mother. The
main point of Christianity was this: that Nature
is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We
can be proud of her beauty, since we have the
same father; but she has no authority over us;
we have to admire, but not to imitate. This
gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this
earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost
frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the
worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a
solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson.
But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi
or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature
is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little,
dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.

This, however, is hardly our main point at
present; I have admitted it only in order to
show how constantly, and as it were accident¬
ally, the key would fit the smallest doors. Our
main point is here, that if there be a mere

207

Orthodoxy

trend of impersonal improvement in Nature, it
must presumably be a simple trend towards
some simple triumph. One can imagine that
some automatic tendency in biology might
work for giving us longer and longer noses.
But the question is, do we want to have longer
and longer noses? I fancy not; I believe that
we most of us want to say to our noses, “thus
far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud
point be stayed:” we require a nose of such
length as may ensure an interesting face. But
we cannot imagine a mere biological trend
towards producing interesting faces ; because an
interesting face is one particular arrangement
of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex
relation to each other. Proportion cannot be a
drift: it is either an accident or a design. So
with the ideal of human morality and its rela¬
tion to the humanitarians and the anti-humani¬
tarians. It is conceivable that we are going
more and more to keep our hands off things:
not to drive horses; not td pick flowers. We
may eventually be bound not to disturb a man’s
mind even by argument; not to disturb the
sleep of birds even by coughing. The ultimate
apotheosis would appear to be that of a man
sitting quite still, nor daring to stir for fear of
disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear of incom-

The Eternal Revolution

moding a microbe. To so crude a consumma¬
tion as that we might perhaps unconsciously
drift. But do we want so crude a consumma¬
tion ? Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve
along the opposite or Nietzschian line of de¬
velopment — superman crushing superman in
one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed
up for fun. But do we want the universe
smashed up for fun ? Is it not quite clear that
what we really hope for is one particular man¬
agement and proposition of these two things; a
certain amount of restraint and respect, a
certain amount of energy and mastery ? If our
life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale,
we shall have to remember that all the beauty
of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a
wonder which just stops short of being fear.
If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of
him; but also if he is not astonished at the
giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. The
whole point depends upon his being at once
humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough
to defy. So our attitude to the giant of the
world must not merely be increasing delicacy
or increasing contempt: it must be one par¬
ticular proportion of the two — which is exactly
right. We must have in us enough reverence
for all things outside us to make us tread fear-

209

Orthodoxy

fully on the grass. We must also have enough
disdain for all things outside us, to make us,
on due occasion, spit at the stars. Yet these
two things (if we are to be good or happy) must
be combined, not in any combination, but in
one particular combination. The perfect hap¬
piness of men on the earth (if it ever comes)
will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satis¬
faction of animals. It will be an exact and
perilous balance; like that of a desperate ro¬
mance. Man must have just enough faith in
himself to have adventures, and just enough
doubt of himself to enjoy them.

This, then, is our second requirement for the
ideal of progress. First, it must be fixed;
second, it must be composite. It must not
(if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere vic¬
tory of some one thing swallowing up every¬
thing else, love or pride or peace or adventure;
it must be a definite picture composed of these
elements in their best proportion and relation.
I am not concerned at this moment to deny
that some such good culmination may be, by
the constitution of things, reserved for the
human race. I only point out that if this com¬
posite happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed
by some mind; for only a mind can place the
exact proportions of a composite happiness.

210

The Eternal Revolution

If the beatification of the world is a mere work
of nature, then it must be as simple as the
freezing of the world, or the burning up of the
world. But if the beatification of the world is
not a work of nature but a work of art, then it
involves an artist. And here again my con¬
templation was cloven by the ancient voice
which said, “I could have told you all this a
long time ago. If there is any certain progress
it can only be my kind of progress, the progress
towards a complete city of virtues and domina¬
tions where righteousness and peace contrive to
kiss each other. An impersonal force might be
leading you to a wilderness of perfect flatness
or a peak of perfect height. But only a per¬
sonal God can possibly be leading you (if,
indeed, you are being led) to a city with just
streets and architectural proportions, a city in
which each of you can contribute exactly the
right amount of your own colour to the many
coloured coat of Joseph.”

Twice again, therefore, Christianity had
come in with the exact answer that I required.
I had said, “The ideal must be fixed,” and the
Church had answered, “Mine is literally fixed,
for it existed before anything else.” I said
secondly, “It must be artistically combined,
like a picture”; and the Church answered,

21 1

Orthodoxy

“Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know
who painted it.” Then I went on to the third
thing, which, as it seemed to me, was needed
for an Utopia or goal of progress. And of all
the three it is infinitely the hardest to express.
Perhaps it might be put thus: that we need
watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall from
Utopia as we fell from Eden.

We have remarked that one reason offered
for being a progressive is that things naturally
tend to grow better. But the only real reason
for being a progressive is that things naturally
tend to grow worse. The corruption in things
is not only the best argument for being pro¬
gressive; it is also the only argument against
being conservative. The conservative theory
would really be quite sweeping and unanswer¬
able if it were not for this one fact. But all
conservatism is based upon the idea that if you
leave things alone you leave them as they are.
But you do not. If you leave a thing alone
you leave it to a torrent of change. If you
leave a white post alone it will soon be a black
post. If you particularly want it to be white
you must be always painting it again; that is,
you must be always having a revolution. Briefly,
if you want the old white post you must have a '
new white post. But this which is true even

212

The Eternal Revolution

of inanimate things is in a quite special and
terrible sense true of all human things. An
almost unnatural vigilance is really required
of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity
with which human institutions grow old. It is
the custom in passing romance and journalism
to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies.
But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered
under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had
been public liberties hardly twenty years be¬
fore. Thus England went mad with joy over
the patriotic monarchy of Elizabeth; and then
(almost immediately afterwards) went mad
with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles
the First. So, again, in France the monarchy
became intolerable, not just after it had been
tolerated, but just after it had been adored.
The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis
the guillotined. So in the same way in England
in the nineteenth century the Radical manu¬
facturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune
of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry
of the Socialist that he was a tyrant eating the
people like bread. So again, we have almost
up to the last instant trusted the newspapers
as organs of public opinion. Just recently
some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a
start) that they are obviously nothing of the

2I3

Orthodoxy

kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the
hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any
need to rebel against antiquity; we have to
rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the
capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the
modern world. There is no fear that a modern
king will attempt to override the constitution;
it is more likely that he will ignore the constitu¬
tion and work behind its back; he will take no
advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely
that he will take advantage of his kingly power¬
lessness, of the fact that he is free from criticism
and publicity. For the king is the most private
person of our time. It will not be necessary
for any one to fight again against the proposal
of a censorship of the press. We do not need
a censorship of the press. We have a censor¬
ship by the press.

This startling swiftness with which popular
systems turn oppressive is the third fact for
which we shall ask our perfect theory of pro¬
gress to allow. It must always be on the look
out for every privilege being abused, for every
working right becoming a wrong. In this
matter I am entirely on the side of the revo¬
lutionists. They are really right to be always
suspecting human institutions; they are right
not to put their trust in princes nor in any child

214

The Eternal Revolution

of man. The chieftain chosen to be the friend
of the people becomes the enemy of the people ;
the newspaper started to tell the truth now
exists to prevent the truth being told. Here, I
say, I felt that I was really at last on the side
of the revolutionary. And then I caught my
breath again : for I remembered that I was once
again on the side of the orthodox.

Christianity spoke again and said: “I have
always maintained that men were naturally
backsliders; that human virtue tended of its
own nature to rust or to rot ; I have always said
that human beings as such go wrong, especially
happy human beings, especially proud and
prosperous human beings. This eternal revo¬
lution, this suspicion sustained through cen¬
turies, you (being a vague modern) call the
doctrine of progress. If you were a philoso¬
pher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of
original sin. You may call it the cosmic
advance as much as you like; I call it what it
is — the Fall.

I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a
sword; here I confess it came in like a battle-
axe. For really (when I came to think of it)
Christianity is the only thing left that has any
real right to question the power of the well-
nurtured or the well-bred. I have listened

215

Orthodoxy

often enough to Socialists, or even to demo¬
crats, saying that the physical conditions of the
poor must of necessity make them mentally
and morally degraded. I have listened to
scientific men (and there are still scientific men
not opposed to democracy) saying that if we
give the poor healthier conditions vice and
wrong will disappear. I have listened to them
with a horrible attention, with a hideous fas¬
cination. For it was like watching a man
energetically sawing from the tree the branch
he is sitting on. If these happy democrats
could prove their case, they would strike democ¬
racy dead. If the poor are thus utterly demor¬
alized, it may or may not be practical to raise
them. But it is certainly quite practical to
disfranchise them. If the man with a bad
bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the
first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give
no vote. The governing class may not unrea¬
sonably say: “It may take us some time to
reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute
you say, it will take him very little time to ruin
our country. Therefore we will take your hint
and not give him the chance.” It fills me with
horrible amusement to observe the way in
which the earnest Socialist industriously lays
the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating

216

The Eternal Revolution

blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor
to rule. It is like listening to somebody at an
evening party apologising for entering without
evening dress, and explaining that he had
recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit
of taking off his clothes in the street, and had,
moreover, only just changed from prison uni¬
form. At any moment, one feels, the host
might say that really, if it was as bad as that,
he need not come in at all. So it is when the
ordinary Socialist, with a beaming face, proves
that the poor, after their smashing experiences,
cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment
the rich may say, “Very well, then, we won’t
trust them,” and bang the door in his face.
On the basis of Mr. Blatchford’s view of
heredity and environment, the case for the
aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean
homes and clean air make clean souls, why not
give the power (for the present at any rate) to
those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If
better conditions will make the poor more fit
to govern themselves, why should not better
conditions already make the rich more fit to
govern them? On the ordinary environment
argument the matter is fairly manifest. The
comfortable class must be merely our vanguard
in Utopia.

217

Orthodoxy

Is there any answer to the proposition that
those who have had the best opportunities will
probably be our best guides? Is there any
answer to the argument that those who have
breathed clean air had better decide for those
who have breathed foul? As far as I know,
there is only one answer, and that answer is
Christianity. Only the Christian Church can
offer any rational objection to a complete con¬
fidence in the rich. For she has maintained
from the beginning that the danger was not in
man’s environment, but in man. Further, she
has maintained that if we come to talk of a
dangerous environment, the most dangerous
environment of all is the commodious environ¬
ment. I know that the most modern manu¬
facture has been really occupied in trying to
produce an abnormally large needle. I know
that the most recent biologists have been chiefly
anxious to discover a very small camel. But if
we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open
the eye of the needle to its largest — if, in short,
we assume the words of Christ to have meant
the very least that they could mean, His words
must at the very least mean this — that rich
men are not very likely to be morally trust¬
worthy. Christianity even when watered down
is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

218

The Eternal Revolution

The mere minimum of the Church would be a
deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole
modem world is absolutely based on the assump¬
tion, not that the rich are necessary (which is
tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy,
which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You
will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about
newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party
politics, this argument that the rich man cannot
be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich
man is bribed; he has been bribed already.
That is why he is a rich man. The whole case
for Christianity is that a man who is dependent
upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man,
spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, finan¬
cially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ
and all the Christian saints have said with a
sort of savage monotony. They have said
simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger
of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-
Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable
justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to
crown the rich as convenient rulers of society.
It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against
the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is
quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich,
to regard the rich as more morally safe than the
poor. A Christian may consistently say, “I

219

Orthodoxy

respect that man’s rank, although he takes
bribes.” But a Christian cannot say, as all
modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast,
“a man of that rank would not take bribes.”
For it is a part of Christian dogma that any
man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part
of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious
coincidence that it is a part of obvious human
history. When people say that a man “in that
position” would be incorruptible, there is no
need to bring Christianity into the discussion.
Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke
of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the
best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral
fall of any man in any position at any moment;
especially for my fall from my position at this
moment.

Much vague and sentimental journalism has
been poured out to the effect that Christianity
is akin to democracy, and most of it is scarcely
strong or clear enough to refute the fact that
the two things have often quarrelled. The real
ground upon which Christianity and democracy
are one is very much deeper. The one specially
and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of
Carlyle — the idea that the man should rule
who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is
Christian, this is heathen. If our faith com-

229

The Eternal Revolution

merits on government at all, its comment must
be this — that the man should rule who does
not think that he can rule. Carlyle’s hero may
say, “I will be king”; but the Christian saint
must say “Nolo episcopari.” If the great
paradox of Christianity means anything, it
means this — that we must take the crown in
our hands, and go hunting in dry places and
dark comers of the earth until we find the one
man who feels himself unfit to wear it. Car¬
lyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown
the exceptional man who knows he can rule.
Rather we must crown the much more excep¬
tional man who knows he can’t.

Now, this is one of the two or three vital
defences of working democracy. The mere
machinery of voting is not democracy, though
at present it is not easy to effect any simpler
democratic method. But even the machinery
of voting is profoundly Christian in this prac¬
tical sense — that it is an attempt to get at the
opinion of those who would be too modest to
offer it. It is a mystical adventure; it is spe¬
cially trusting those who do not trust themselves.
That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom.
There is nothing really humble about the abne¬
gation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindoo is
mild, but he is not meek. But there is some-

221

Orthodoxy

thing psychologically Christian about the idea
of seeking for the opinion of the obscure rather
than taking the obvious course of accepting the
opinion of the prominent. To say that voting
is particularly Christian may seem somewhat
curious. To say that canvassing is Christian
may seem quite crazy. But canvassing is very
Christian in its primary idea. It is encouraging
the humble; it is saying to the modest man,
“Friend, go up higher.” Or if there is some
slight defect in canvassing, that is in its perfect
and rounded piety, it is only because it may
possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of
the canvasser.

Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy
is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is
merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of
natural pomposity and praise of the powerful,
which is the most easy and obvious affair in the
world.

It is one of the hundred answers to the fugi¬
tive perversion of modern “force” that the
promptest and boldest agencies are also the
most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest
things are the softest things. A bird is active,
because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless,
because a stone is hard. The stone must by
its own nature go downwards, because hardness

222

The Eternal Revolution

is weakness. The bird can of its nature go
upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect
force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness
that can maintain itself in the air. Modern
investigators of miraculous history have sol¬
emnly admitted that a characteristic of the great
saints is their power of “ levitation.” They
might go further; a characteristic of the great
saints is their power of levity, Angels can fly
because they can take themselves lightly. This
has been always the instinct of Christendom,
and especially the instinct of Christian art.
Remember how Fra Angelico represented all
his angels, not only as birds, but almost as
butterflies. Remember how the most earnest
mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering
draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was
the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites
could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites.
Burne-Jones could never recover the deep
levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Chris¬
tian pictures the sky over every figure is
like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure
seems ready to fly up and float about in the
heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar
will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the
angels. But the kings in their heavy gold
and the proud in their robes of purple will all

223

Orthodoxy

of their nature sink downwards, for pride
cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the
downward drag of all things into an easy so¬
lemnity. One “ settles down” into a sort of
selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay
self-forgetfulness. A man “ falls” into a brown
study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Serious¬
ness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but
a much more sensible heresy, to say that serious¬
ness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or
lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it
is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to
write a good Times leading article than a good
joke in Punch . For solemnity flows out of
men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is
easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell
by the force of gravity.

Now, it is the peculiar honour of Europe
since it has been Christian that while it has
had aristocracy it has always at the back of its
heart treated aristocracy as a weakness —
generally as a weakness that must be allowed
for. If any one wishes to appreciate this point,
let him go outside Christianity into some other
philosophical atmosphere. Let him, for in¬
stance, compare the classes of Europe with the
castes of India. There aristocracy is far more
awful, because it is far more intellectual. It

224

The Eternal Revolution

is seriously felt that the scale of classes is a
scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better
than the butcher in an invisible and sacred
sense. But no Christianity, not even the most
ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a
baronet was better than a butcher in that
sacred sense. No Christianity, however igno¬
rant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke
would not be damned. In pagan society there
may have been (I do not know) some such
serious division between the free man and the
slave. But in Christian society we have always
thought the gentleman a sort of joke, though
I admit that in some great crusades and coun¬
cils he earned the right to be called a practical
joke. But we in Europe never really and at
the root of our souls took aristocracy seriously.
It is only an occasional non-European alien
(such as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent
Nietzscheite) who can even manage for a
moment to take aristocracy seriously. It may
be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think
so, but it seems to me that the English aris¬
tocracy is not only the type, but is the crown
and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all
the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects.
It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious
matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps

225

Orthodoxy

even these. The great and very obvious merit
of the English aristocracy is that nobody could
possibly take it seriously.

In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual,
the need for an equal law in Utopia; and, as
usual, I found that Christianity had been there
before me. The whole history of my Utopia
has the same amusing sadness. I was always
rushing out of my architectural study with
plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up
there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand
years old. For me, in the ancient and partly in
the modern sense, God answered the prayer,
“Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings.”
Without vanity, I really think there was a
moment when I could have invented the mar¬
riage vow (as an institution) out of my own
head; but I discovered, with a sigh, that it had
been invented already. But, since it would be
too long a business to show how, fact by fact
and inch by inch, my own conception of Utopia
was only answered in the New Jerusalem, I
will take this one case of the matter of marriage
as indicating the converging drift, I may say
the converging crash of all the rest.

When the ordinary opponents of Socialism
talk about impossibilities and alterations in
human nature they always miss an important

226

The Eternal Revolution

distinction. In modem ideal conceptions of
society there are some desires that are possibly
not attainable: but there are some desires that
are not desirable. That all men should live in
equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or
may not be attained. But that all men should
live in the same beautiful house is not a dream
at all; it is a nightmare. That a man should
love all old women is an ideal that may not be
attainable. But that a man should regard all
old women exactly as he regards his mother is
not only an unattainable ideal, but an ideal
which ought not to be attained. I do not know
if the reader agrees with me in these examples;
but I will add the example which has always
affected me most. I could never conceive or
tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me
the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty
to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not
merely make it impossible to have any dis¬
cipline or fidelity; it would also make it im¬
possible to have any fun. To take an obvious
instance, it would not be worth while to bet if
a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all
contracts would not only ruin morality but
spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are
only the stunted and twisted shapes of the
original instinct of man for adventure and

227

Orthodoxy

romance, of which much has been said in these
pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments,
and fulfilments of an adventure must be real,
or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless
nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay,
or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge
I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry
in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must
be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no
fun in vowing. You could not even make a
fairy tale from the experiences of a man who,
when he was swallowed by a whale, might find
himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when
he was turned into a frog might begin to behave
like a flamingo. For the purpose even of the
wildest romance results must be real; results
must be irrevocable. Christian marriage is the
great example of a real and irrevocable result;
and that is why it is the chief subject and centre
of all our romantic writing. And this is my
last instance of the things that I should ask, and
ask imperatively, of any social paradise ; I
should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have
my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I
should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on
myself.

All my modern Utopian friends look at each
other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope

228

The Eternal Revolution

is the dissolution of all special ties. But again
I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer
from beyond the world. “You will have real
obligations, and therefore real adventures when
you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obli¬
gation and the steepest adventure is to get there.”

VIII — The Romance of Orthodoxy

IT is customary to complain of the bustle
and strenuousness of our epoch. But in
truth the chief mark of our epoch is a
profound laziness and fatigue ; and the
fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the
apparent bustle. Take one quite external case;
the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motor¬
cars; but this is not due to human activity but
to human repose. There would be less bustle
if there were more activity, if people were
simply walking about. Our world would be
more silent if it were more strenuous. And
this which is true of the apparent physical
bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the
intellect. Most of the machinery of modern
language is labour-saving machinery; and it
saves mental labour very much more than it
ought. Scientific phrases are used like scien¬
tific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and
smoother yet the path of the comfortable.
Long words go rattling by us like long railway
trains. We know they are carrying thousands
who are too tired or too indolent to walk and
think for themselves. It is a good exercise to

230

The Romance of Orthodoxy

try for once in a way to express any opinion
one holds in words of one syllable. If you
say “The social utility of the indeterminate
sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a
part of our sociological evolution towards a
more humane and scientific view of punish¬
ment,” you can go on talking like that for hours
with hardly a movement of the gray matter
inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish
Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when
Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with
a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the
short words that are hard. There is much
more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn”
than in the word “degeneration.”

But these long comfortable words that save
modern people the toil of reasoning have one
particular aspect in which they are especially
ruinous and confusing. This difficulty occurs
when the same long word is used in different
connections to mean quite different things.
Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word
“idealist” has one meaning as a piece of philo¬
sophy and quite another as a piece of moral
rhetoric. In the same way the scientific ma¬
terialists have had just reason to complain of
people mixing up “materialist” as a term of

231

Orthodoxy

cosmology with “materialist” as a moral taunt.
So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who
hates “progressives” in London always calls
himself a “progressive” in South Africa.

A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has
arisen in connection with the word “liberal”
as applied to religion and as applied to politics
and society. It is often suggested that all
Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they
ought to love everything that is free. You
might just as well say that all idealists ought to
be High Churchmen, because they ought to
love everything that is high. You might as
well say that Low Churchmen ought to like
Low Mass, or that Broad Churchmen ought to
like broad jokes. The thing is a mere accident
of words. In actual modern Europe a free¬
thinker does not mean a man who thinks for
himself. It means a man who, having thought
for himself, has come to one particular class of
conclusions, the material origin of phenomena,
the impossibility of miracles, the improbability
of personal immortality and so on. And none
of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay,
indeed almost all these ideas are definitely
illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to
show.

In the few following pages I propose to point

232

The Romance of Orthodoxy

out as rapidly as possible that on every single
one of the matters most strongly insisted on by
liberalisers of theology their effect upon social
practice would be definitely illiberal. Almost
every contemporary proposal to bring freedom
into the church is simply a proposal to bring
tyranny into the world. For freeing the church
now does not even mean freeing it in all direc¬
tions. It means freeing that peculiar set of
dogmas loosely called scientific, dogmas of
monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of
necessity. And every one of these (and we
will take them one by one) can be shown to be
the natural ally of oppression. In fact, it is a
remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very
remarkable when one comes to think of it) that
most things are the allies of oppression. There
is only one thing that can never go past a certain
point in its alliance with oppression — and that
is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist ortho¬
doxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can
easily make up a German philosophy to justify
him entirely.

Now let us take in order the innovations that
are the notes of the new theology or the mod¬
ernist church. We concluded the last chapter
with the discovery of one of them. The very
doctrine which is called the most old-fashioned

233

Orthodoxy

was found to be the only safeguard of the new
democracies of the earth. The doctrine seem¬
ingly most unpopular was found to be the only
strength of the people. In short, we found that
the only logical negation of oligarchy was in
the affirmation of original sin. So it is, I main¬
tain, in all the other cases.

I take the most obvious instance first, the
case of miracles. For some extraordinary rea¬
son, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal
to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in
them. Why, I cannot imagine, nor can any¬
body tell me. For some inconceivable cause
a “broad” or “liberal” clergyman always
means a man who wishes at least to diminish
the number of miracles; it never means a man
who wishes to increase that number. It always
means a man who is free to disbelieve that
Christ came out of His grave; it never means a
man who is free to believe that his own aunt
came out of her grave. It is common to find
trouble in a parish because the parish priest
cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water;
yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish
because the clergyman says that his father
walked on the Serpentine? And this is not
because (as the swift secularist debater would
immediately retort) miracles cannot be believed

234

The Romance of Orthodoxy

in our experience. It is not because “miracles
do not happen,” as in the dogma which Mat¬
thew Arnold recited with simple faith. More
supernatural things are alleged to have hap¬
pened in our time than would have been possible
eighty years ago. Men of science believe in
such marvels much more than they did: the
most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies
of mind and spirit are always being unveiled
in modern psychology. Things that the old
science at least would frankly have rejected as
miracles are hourly being asserted by the new
science. The only thing which is still old-
fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New
Theology. But in truth this notion that it is
“free” to deny miracles has nothing to do with
the evidence for or against them. It is a lifeless
verbal prejudice of which the original life and
beginning was not in the freedom of thought,
but simply in the dogma of materialism. The
man of the nineteenth century did not dis¬
believe in the Resurrection because his liberal
Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He dis¬
believed in it because his very strict materialism
did not allow him to believe it. Tennyson, a
very typical nineteenth century man, uttered
one of the instinctive truisms of his contem¬
poraries when he said that there was faith in

23s

Orthodoxy

their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those
words have a profound and even a horrible
truth. In their doubt of miracles there was a
faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and
sincere faith in the incurable routine of the
cosmos. The doubts of the agnostic were only
the dogmas of the monist.

Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural
I will speak afterwards. Here we are only
concerned with this clear point; that in so far
as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be
on either side in the discussion about miracles,
it is obviously on the side of miracles. Reform
or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means
simply the gradual control of matter by mind.
A miracle simply means the swift control of
matter by mind. If you wish to feed the
people, you may think that feeding them
miraculously in the wilderness is impossible
— but you cannot think it illiberal. If you
really want poor children to go to the seaside,
you cannot think it illiberal that they should
go there on flying dragons; you can only think
it unlikely. A holiday, like Liberalism, only
means the liberty of man. A miracle only
means the liberty of God. You may con¬
scientiously deny either of them, but you cannot
call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea,

236

The Romance of Orthodoxy

The Catholic Church believed that man and
God both had a sort of spiritual freedom.
Calvinism took away the freedom from man,
but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds
the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the
Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves noth¬
ing free in the universe. And those who assist
this process are called the “liberal theologians.”

This, as I say, is the lightest and most evi¬
dent case. The assumption that there is some¬
thing in the doubt of miracles akin to liberality
or reform is literally the opposite of the truth.
If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an
end of the matter; he is not particularly liberal,
but he is perfectly honourable and logical,
which are much better things. But if he can
believe in miracles, he is certainly the more
liberal for doing so; because they mean first,
the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its con¬
trol over the tyranny of circumstance. Some¬
times this truth is ignored in a singularly naive
way, even by the ablest men. For instance,
Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty old-
fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as
if they were a sort of breach of faith on the
part of nature: he seems strangely unconscious
that miracles are only the final flowers of his
own favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnip-

237

Orthodoxy

otence of will. Just in the same way he calls
the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness,
forgetting that he has just called the desire for
life a healthy and heroic selfishness. How can
it be noble to wish to make one’s life infinite
and yet mean to wish to make it immortal?
No, if it is desirable that man should triumph
over the cruelty of nature or custom, then
miracles are certainly desirable; we will discuss
afterwards whether they are possible.

But I must pass on to the larger cases of this
curious error; the notion that the “ liberalising”
of religion in some way helps the liberation of
the world. The second example of it can be
found in the question of pantheism — or rather
of a certain modern attitude which is often
called immanentism, and which often is Bud¬
dhism. But this is so much more difficult a
matter that I must approach it with rather
more preparation.

The things said most confidently by advanced
persons to crowded audiences are generally those
quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our tru¬
isms that are untrue. Here is a case. There
is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and
again at ethical societies and parliaments of
religion: “the religions of the earth differ in
rites and forms, but they are the same in what

238

The Romance of Orthodoxy

they teach.” It is false; it is the opposite of
the fact. The religions of the earth do not
greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly
differ in what they teach. It is as if a man
were to say, “Do not be misled by the fact
that the Church Times and the Freethinker
look utterly different, that one is painted on
vellum and the other carved on marble, that
one is triangular and the other hectagonal;
read them and you will see that they say the
same thing.” The truth is, of course, that they
are alike in everything except in the fact that
they don’t say the same thing. An atheist
stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a
Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You
may walk round and round them and subject
them to the most personal and offensive study
without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the
hat or anything particularly godless in the
umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they
are divided. So the truth is that the difficulty
of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged
in this cheap maxim : that they agree in meaning,
but differ in machinery. It is exactly the op¬
posite. They agree in machinery; almost every
great religion on earth works with the same
external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars,
sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree

Orthodoxy

in the mode of teaching; what they differ about
is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists
and Eastern pessimists would both have tem¬
ples, just as Liberals and Tories would both
have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy
each other both have scriptures, just as armies
that exist to destroy each other both have guns.

The great example of this alleged identity of
all human religions is the alleged spiritual
identity of Buddhism and Christianity. Those
who adopt this theory generally avoid the
ethics of most other creeds, except, indeed,
Confucianism, which they like because it is
not a creed. But they are cautious in their
praises of Mahommedanism, generally confin¬
ing themselves to imposing its morality only
upon the refreshment of the lower classes.
They seldom suggest the Mahommedan view
of marriage (for which there is a great deal to
be said), and towards Thugs and fetish wor¬
shippers their attitude may even be called cold.
But in the case of the great religion of Gautama
they feel sincerely a similarity.

Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatch-
ford, are always insisting that Christianity and
Buddhism are very much alike, especially Bud¬
dhism. This is generally believed, and I be¬
lieved it myself until I read a book giving the

240

The Romance of Orthodoxy

reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds:
resemblances that meant nothing because they
were common to all humanity, and resemblances
which were not resemblances at all. The
author solemnly explained that the two creeds
were alike in things in which all creeds are
alike, or else he described them as alike in
some point in which they are quite obviously
different. . Thus, as a case of the first class, he
said that both Christ and Buddha were called
by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as
if you would expect the divine voice to come
out of the coal-cellar. Or, again, it was gravely
urged that these two Eastern teachers, by a
singular coincidence, both had to do with the
washing of feet. You might as well say that
it was a remarkable coincidence that they both
had feet to wash. And the other class of simi¬
larities were those which simply were not simi¬
lar. Thus this reconciler of the two religions
draws earnest attention to the fact that at
certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama is
rent in pieces out of respect, and the remnants
highly valued. But this is the reverse of a
resemblance, for the garments of Christ were
not rent in pieces out of respect, but out of
derision; and the remnants were not highly
valued except for what they would fetch in the

241

Orthodoxy

rag shops. It is rather like alluding to the
obvious connection between the two ceremonies
of the sword: when it taps a man’s shoulder,
and when it cuts off his head. It is not at all
similar for the man. These scraps of puerile
pedantry would indeed matter little if it were
not also true that the alleged philosophical
resemblances are also of these two kinds, either
proving too much or not proving anything.
That Buddhism approves of mercy or of self-
restraint is not to say that it is specially like
Christianity; it is only to say that it is not
utterly unlike all human existence. Buddhists
disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess be¬
cause all sane human beings disapprove in
theory of cruelty or excess. But to say that
Buddhism and Christianity give the same
philosophy of these things is simply false. All
humanity does agree that we are in a net of
sin. Most of humanity agrees that there is
some way out. But as to what is the way out,
I do not think that there are two institutions
in the universe which contradict each other so
flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.

Even when I thought, with most other well-
informed, though unscholarly, people, that
Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there
was one thing about them that always per-

24Z

The Romance of Orthodoxy

plexed me; I mean the startling difference in
their type of religious art. I do not mean in
its technical style of representation, but in the
things that it was manifestly meant to repre¬
sent. No two ideals could be more opposite
than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and
a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The
opposition exists at every point; but perhaps
the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist
saint always has his eyes shut, while the Chris¬
tian saint always has them very wide open.
The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious
body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with
sleep. The mediaeval saint’s body is wasted to
its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully
alive. There cannot be any real community
of spirit between forces that produced symbols
so different as that. Granted that both images
are extravagances, are perversions of the pure
creed, it must be a real divergence which could
produce such opposite extravagances. The
Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness
inwards. The Christian is staring with a
frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that
clue steadily we shall find some interesting
things.

A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interest¬
ing essay, announced that there was only one

243

Orthodoxy

religion in the world, that all faiths were only
versions or perversions of it, and that she was
quite prepared to say what it was. According
to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply
the universal self. It is the doctrine that we
are really all one person; that there are no real
walls of individuality between man and man.
If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love
our neighbours; she tells us to be our neigh¬
bours. That is Mrs. Besant’s thoughtful and
suggestive description of the religion in which
all men must find themselves in agreement.
And I never heard of any suggestion in my
life with which I more violently disagree. I
want to love my neighbour not because he is I,
but precisely because he is not I. I want to
adore the world, not as one likes a looking-
glass, because it is one’s self, but as one loves a
woman, because she is entirely different. If
souls are separate love is possible. If souls are
united love is obviously impossible. A man
may be said loosely to love himself, but he can
hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does,
it must be a monotonous courtship. If the
world is full of real selves, they can be really
unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant’s prin¬
ciple the whole cosmos is only one enormously
selfish person.

244

The Romance of Orthodoxy

It is just here that Buddhism is on the side
of modem pantheism and immanence. And
it is just here that Christianity is on the side
of humanity and liberty and love. Love de¬
sires personality; therefore love desires division.
It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that
God has broken the universe into little pieces,
because they are living pieces. It is her in¬
stinct to say “little children love one another”
rather than to tell one large person to love
himself. This is the intellectual abyss between
Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Bud¬
dhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of
man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God,
the whole point of his cosmic idea. The
world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to
love it only in order that man may throw him¬
self into it. But the divine centre of Chris¬
tianity actually threw man out of it in order
that he might love it. The oriental deity is
like a giant who should have lost his leg or
hand and be always seeking to find it; but the
Christian power is like some giant who in a
strange generosity should cut off his right hand,
so that it might of its own accord shake hands
with him. We come back to the same tireless
note touching the nature of Christianity; all
modern philosophies are chains which connect

245

Orthodoxy

and fetter; Christianity is a sword which sep¬
arates and sets free. No other philosophy
makes God actually rejoice in the separation
of the universe into living souls. But according
to orthodox Christianity this separation between
God and man is sacred, because this is eternal.
That a man may love God it is necessary that
there should be not only a God to be loved,
but a man to love him. All those vague theo-
sophical minds for whom the universe is an
immense melting-pot are exactly the minds
which shrink instinctively from that earthquake
saying of our Gospels, which declare that the
Son of God came not with peace but with a
sundering sword. The saying rings entirely
true even considered as what it obviously is;
the statement that any man who preaches real
love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of
democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham
love ends in compromise and common philo¬
sophy; but real love has always ended in blood¬
shed. Yet there is another and yet more awful
truth behind the obvious meaning of this utter¬
ance of our Lord. According to Himself
the Son was a sword separating brother and
brother that they should for an aeon hate each
other. But the Father also was a sword, which
in the black beginning separated brother and

246

The Romance of Orthodoxy

brother, so that they should love each other
at last.

This is the meaning of that almost insane
happiness in the eyes of the mediaeval saint in
the picture. This is the meaning of the sealed
eyes of the superb Buddhist image. The Chris¬
tian saint is happy because he has verily been
cut off from the world; he is separate from
things and is staring at them in astonishment.
But why should the Buddhist saint be aston¬
ished at things ?— since there is really only one
thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be
astonished at itself. There have been many
pantheist poems suggesting wonder, but no
really successful ones. The pantheist cannot
wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise
anything as really distinct from himself. Our
immediate business here, however, is with the
effect of this Christian admiration (which
strikes outwards, towards a deity distinct from
the worshipper) upon the general need for
ethical activity and social reform. And surely
its effect is sufficiently obvious. There is no
real possibility of getting out of pantheism any
special impulse to moral action. For pan¬
theism implies in its nature that one thing is
as good as another; whereas action implies in
its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to

247

Orthodoxy

another. Swinburne in the high summer of
his scepticism tried in vain to wrestle with this
difficulty. In “Songs before Sunrise,” written
under the inspiration of Garibaldi and the
revolt of Italy he proclaimed the newer religion
and the purer God which should wither up all
the priests of the world :

“What doest thou now
Looking Godward to cry
I am I, thou art thou,

I am low, thou art high,

I am thou that thou seekest to find him, find
thou but thyself, thou art I.”

Of which the immediate and evident deduc¬
tion is that tyrants are as much the sons of God
as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba of Naples
having, with the utmost success, “found him¬
self” is identical with the ultimate good in all
things. The truth is that the western energy
that dethrones tyrants has been directly due to
the western theology that says “I am I, thou
art thou.” The same spiritual separation which
looked up and saw a good king in the universe
looked up and saw a bad king in Naples. The
worshippers of Bomba’s god dethroned Bomba.
The worshippers of Swinburne’s god have
covered Asia for centuries and have never

248

The Romance of Orthodoxy

dethroned a tyrant. The Indian saint may
reasonably shut his eyes beause he is looking
at that which is I and Thou and We and They
and It. It is a rational occupation: but it is
not true in theory and not true in fact that it
helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon.
That external vigilance which has always been
the mark of Christianity (the command that
we should watch and pray) has expressed itself
both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical
western politics: but both depend on the idea
of a divinity transcendent, different from our¬
selves, a deity that disappears. Certainly the
most sagacious creeds may suggest that we
should pursue God into deeper and deeper
rings of the labyrinth of our own ego. But only
we of Christendom have said that we should
hunt God like an eagle upon the moun¬
tains: and we have killed all monsters in the
chase.

Here again, therefore, we find that in so far
as we value democracy and the self-renewing
energies of the west, we are much more likely
to find them in the old theology than the new.
If we want reform, we must adhere to ortho¬
doxy: especially in this matter (so much dis¬
puted in the counsels of Mr. R. J. Campbell),
the matter of insisting on the immanent or the

249

Orthodoxy

transcendent deity. By insisting specially on
the immanence of God we get introspection,
self-isolation, quietism, social indifference —
Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcen¬
dence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral
and political adventure, righteous indignation
— Christendom. Insisting that God is inside
man, man is always inside himself. By insist¬
ing that God transcends man, man has tran¬
scended himself.

If we take any other doctrine that has been
called old-fashioned we shall find the case the
same. It is the same, for instance, in the deep
matter of the Trinity. Unitarians (a sect never
to be mentioned without a special respect for
their distinguished intellectual dignity and high
intellectual honour) are often reformers by the
accident that throws so many small sects into
such an attitude. But there is nothing in the
least liberal or akin to reform in the substitu¬
tion of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The
complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be
an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less
likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a
Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet.
The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a
king but an Eastern king. The heart of hu¬
manity, especially of European humanity, is

250

The Romance of Orthodoxy

certainly much more satisfied by the strange
hints and symbols that gather round the Trini¬
tarian idea, the image of a council at which
mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception
of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in
the inmost chamber of the world. For Western
religion has always felt keenly the idea “it is
not well for man to be alone.” The social
instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the
Eastern idea of hermits was practically ex¬
pelled by the Western idea of monks. So even
asceticism became brotherly; and the Trap-
pists were sociable even when they were silent.
If this love of a living complexity be our test,
it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian
religion than the Unitarian. For to us Trini¬
tarians (if I may say it with reverence) — to
us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a
fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I
were theologian enough to deal with it directly,
it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice
it to say here that this triple enigma is as com¬
forting as wine and open as an English fireside;
that this thing that bewilders the intellect
utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert,
from the dry places and the dreadful suns,
come the cruel children of the lonely God; the
real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have

251

Orthodoxy

laid waste the world. For it is not well for
God to be alone.

Again, the same is true of that difficult mat¬
ter of the danger of the soul, which has un¬
settled so many just minds. To hope for all
souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that
their salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but
it is not specially favourable to activity or
progress. Our fighting and creative society
ought rather to insist on the danger of every¬
body, on the fact that every man is hanging by
a thread or clinging to a precipice. To say
that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible
remark: but it cannot be called the blast of a
trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasize
possible perdition; and Europe always has
emphasized it. Here its highest religion is at
one with all its cheapest romances. To the
Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a
science or a plan, which must end up in a cer¬
tain way. But to a Christian existence is a
story, which may end up in any way. In a
thrilling novel (that purely Christian product)
the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is
essential to the existence of the thrill that he
might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must
(so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian
morals have always said to the man, not that

252

The Romance of Orthodoxy

he would lose his soul, but that he must take
care that he didn’t. In Christian morals, in
short, it is wicked to call a man “damned”:
but it is strictly religious and philosophic to
call him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at
the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philo¬
sophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk
about ages and evolution and ultimate develop¬
ments. The true philosophy is concerned with
the instant. Will a man take this road or
that? — that is the only thing to think about, if
you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough
to think about, any one can think about them.
The instant is really awful: and it is because
our religion has intensely felt the instant, that
it has in literature dealt much with battle and
in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of
danger, like a boy’s book: it is at an immortal
crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity
between popular fiction and the religion of the
western people. If you say that popular fiction
is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the
dreary and well-informed say also about the
images in the Catholic churches. Life (accord¬
ing to the faith) is very like a serial story in a
magazine: life ends with the promise (or men¬
ace) “to be continued in our next.” Also,

253

Orthodoxy

with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial
and leaves off at the exciting moment. For
death is distinctly an exciting moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting be¬
cause it has in it so strong an element of will,
of what theology calls free-will. You cannot
finish a sum how you like. But you can finish
a story how you like. When somebody dis¬
covered the Differential Calculus there was
only one Differential Calculus he could dis¬
cover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo
he might have married him to Juliet’s old nurse
if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has
excelled in the narrative romance exactly be¬
cause it has insisted on the theological free¬
will. It is a large matter and too much to one
side of the road to be discussed adequately
here; but this is the real objection to that tor¬
rent of modern talk about treating crime as
disease, about making a prison merely a hy¬
gienic environment like a hospital, of healing
sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of
the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
choice whereas disease is not. If you say that
you are going to cure a profligate as you cure
an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,
“Produce the people who want to be asthmatics
as many people want to be profligates.” A

254

The R omance of Orthodoxy

man may lie still and be cured of a malady.
But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured
of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and
jump about violently. The whole point indeed
is perfectly expressed in the very word which
we use for a man in hospital; “patient” is in
the passive mood; “sinner” is in the active.
If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may
be a patient. But if he is to be saved from
forging, he must be not a patient but an impa¬
tient. He must be personally impatient with
forgery. All moral reform must start in the
active not the passive will.

Here again we reach the same substantial
conclusion. In so far as we desire the definite
reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions
which have distinguished European civiliza¬
tion, we shall not discourage the thought of
possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. If
we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to
contemplate how right things are, of course we
shall only say that they must go right. But if
we particularly want to make them go right, we
must insist that they may go wrong.

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the
case of the common modem attempts to dimin¬
ish or to explain away the divinity of Christ.
The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal

255

Orthodoxy

with before I end. But if the divinity is true
it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a
good man may have his back to the wall is no
more than we knew already; but that God
could have his back to the wall is a boast for
all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the
only religion on earth that has felt that omnip¬
otence made God incomplete. Christianity
alone has felt that God, to be wholly God,
must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone
of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to
the virtues of the Creator. For the only cour¬
age worth calling courage must necessarily
mean that the soul passes a breaking point —
and does not break. In this indeed I approach
a matter more dark and awful than it is easy
to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any
of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent
touching a matter which the greatest saints
and thinkers have justly feared to approach.
But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a
distinct emotional suggestion that the author
of all things (in some unthinkable way) went
not only through agony, but through doubt.
It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord
thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may
tempt Himself ; and it seems as if this was what
happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan

256

The Romance of Orthodoxy

tempted man: and in a garden God tempted
God. He passed in some superhuman manner
through our human horror of pessimism.
When the world shook and the sun was wiped
out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but
at the cry from the cross: the cry which con¬
fessed that God was forsaken of God. And
now let the revolutionists choose a creed from
all the creeds and a god from all the gods of
the world, carefully weighing all the gods of
inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power.
They will not find another god who has himself
been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too
difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists
themselves choose a god. They will find only
one divinity who ever uttered their isolation;
only one religion in which God seemed for an
instant to be an atheist.

These can be called the essentials of the old
orthodoxy, of which the chief merit is that it is
the natural fountain of revolution and reform;
and of which the chief defect is that it is ob¬
viously only an abstract assertion. Its main
advantage is that it is the most adventurous
and manly of all theologies. Its chief disad¬
vantage is simply that it is a theology. It can
always be urged against it that it is in its nature
arbitrary and in the air. But it is not so high

257

Orthodoxy

in the air but that great archers spend their
whole lives in shooting arrows at it — yes, and
their last arrows; there are men who will ruin
themselves and ruin their civilization if they
may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is
the last and most astounding fact about this
faith; that its enemies will use any weapon
against it, the swords that cut their own fingers,
and the firebrands that burn their own homes.
Men who begin to fight the Church for the
sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging
away freedom and humanity if only they may
fight the Church. This is no exaggeration;
I could fill a book with the instances of it.
Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-
smasher, tojDrove that Adam was guiltless of
sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to main¬
tain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that
all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold,
were guiltless of any sin against humanity. I
know a man who has such a passion for prov¬
ing that he will have no personal existence after
death that he falls back on the position that he
has no personal existence now. He invokes
Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each
other; in order to prove that he cannot goto
heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartle¬
pool. I have known people who protested

258

The Romance of Orthodoxy

against religious education with arguments
against any education, saying that the child’s
mind must grow freely or that the old must not
teach the young. I have known people who
showed that there could be no divine judgment
by showing that there can be no human judg¬
ment, even for practical purposes. They burned
their own corn to set fire to the church; they
smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick
was good enough to beat it with, though it were
the last stick of their own dismembered furni¬
ture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse,
the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of
the other. But what are we to say of the
fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred
of the other? He sacrifices the very existence
of humanity to the non-existence of God. He
offers his victims not to the altar, but merely
to assert the idleness of the altar and the empti¬
ness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even
that primary ethic by which all things live, for
his strange and eternal vengeance upon some
one who never lived at all.

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens
unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in de¬
stroying all that they themselves justly hold
dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they
only destroy political and common courage

259

Orthodoxy

sense. They do not prove that Adam was not
responsible to God; how could they prove it?
They only prove (from their premises) that the
Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do
not prove that Adam should not have been
punished by God; they only prove that the
nearest sweater should not be punished by men.
With their oriental doubts about personality
they do not make certain that we shall have no
personal life hereafter; they only make certain
that we shall not have a very jolly or complete
one here. With their paralysing hints of all
conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear
the book of the Recording Angel; they only
make it a little harder to keep the books of
Marshall & Snelgrove. Not only is the faith
the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes
are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The
secularists have not wrecked divine things;
but the secularists have wrecked secular things,
if that is any comfort to them. The Titans
did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the
world.

260

IX — Authority and the Adventurer

THE last chapter has been concerned
with the contention that orthodoxy
is not only (as is often urged) the
only safe guardian of morality or
order, but is also the only logical guardian of
liberty, innovation and advance. If we wish
to pull down the prosperous oppressor we
cannot do it with the new doctrine of human
perfectibility ; we can do it with the old doctrine
of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent
cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot
do it with the scientific theory that matter
precedes mind; we can do it with the super¬
natural theory that mind precedes matter. If
we wish specially to awaken people to social
vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we
cannot help it much by insisting on the Imma¬
nent God and the Inner Light: for these are at
best reasons for contentment; we can help it
much by insisting on the transcendent God and
the flying and escaping gleam; for that means
divine discontent. If we wish particularly to
assert the idea of a generous balance against
that of a dreadful autocracy we shall instinct-

261

Orthodoxy

ively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If
we desire European civilization to be a raid
and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls
are in real peril than that their peril is ulti¬
mately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the
outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish
to think that a veritable God was crucified,
rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all,
if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in
favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The
rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the
poor member. The drift of a club is always
in favour of the rich one.

And now we come to the crucial question
which truly concludes the whole matter. A
reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to
agree with me so far, may justly turn round
and say, “You have found a practical philo¬
sophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well.
You have found a side of democracy now
dangerously neglected wisely asserted in Orig¬
inal Sin; all right. You have found a truth
in the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you.
You are convinced that worshippers of a per¬
sonal God look outwards and are progressive;
I congratulate them. But even supposing that
those doctrines do include those truths, why
cannot you take the truths and leave the doc-

262

Authority and the Adventurer

trines? Granted that all modern society is
trusting the rich too much because it does not
allow for human weakness; granted that ortho¬
dox ages have had a great advantage because
(believing in the Fall) they did allow for human
weakness, why cannot you simply allow for
human weakness without believing in the Fall?
If you have discovered that the idea of damna¬
tion represents a healthy idea of danger, why
can you not simply take the idea of danger and
leave the idea of damnation ? If you see
clearly the kernel of common-sense in the nut
of Christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply
take the kernel and leave the nut ? Why
cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the
newspapers which I, as a highly scholarly
agnostic, am a little ashamed of using) why
cannot you simply take what is good in Chris¬
tianity, what you can define as valuable, what
you can comprehend, and leave all the rest, all
the absolute dogmas that are in their nature
incomprehensible?” This is the real ques¬
tion ; this is the last question ; and it is a pleas¬
ure to try to answer it.

The first answer is simply to say that I am
a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual
justification for my intuitions. If I am treating
man as a fallen being it is an intellectual con-

263

Orthodoxy

venience to me to believe that he fell; and I
find, for some odd psychological reason, that I
can deal better with a man’s exercise of freewill
if I believe that he has got it. But I am in
this matter yet more definitely a rationalist. I
do not propose to turn this book into one of
ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be
glad to meet at any other time the enemies of
Christianity in that more obvious arena. Here
I am only giving an account of my own growth
in spiritual certainty. But I may pause to
remark that the more I saw of the merely
abstract arguments against the Christian cos¬
mology the less I thought of them. I mean that
having found the moral atmosphere of the In¬
carnation to be common sense, I then looked
at the established intellectual arguments against
the Incarnation and found them to be common
nonsense. In case the argument should be
thought to suffer from the absence of the ordi¬
nary apologetic I will here very briefly sum¬
marise my own arguments and conclusions on
the purely objective or scientific truth of the
matter.

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual ques¬
tion, why I believe in Christianity, I can only
answer, “For the same reason that an intel¬
ligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I

264

Authority and the Adventurer

believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence
But the evidence in my case, as in that of the
intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that
alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous
accumulation of small but unanimous facts.
The secularist is not to be blamed because his
objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and
even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evi¬
dence that does convince the mind. I mean
that a man may well be less convinced of a
philosophy from four books, than from one
book, one battle, one landscape, and one old
friend. The very fact that the things are of
different kinds increases the importance of the
fact that they all point to one conclusion.
Now, the non-Christianity of the average
educated man to-day is almost always, to do
him justice, made up of these loose but living
experiences. I can only say that my evidences
for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied
kind as his evidences against it. For when I
look at these various anti-Christian truths, I
simply discover that none of them are true.
I discover that the true tide and force of all the
facts flows the other way. Let us take cases.
Many a sensible modern man must have aban¬
doned Christianity under the pressure of three
such converging convictions as these: first, that

265

Orthodoxy

men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality,
are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere
variety of the animal kingdom; second, that
primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear;
third, that priests have blighted societies with
bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Chris¬
tian arguments are very different; but they are
all quite logical and legitimate; and they all
converge. The only objection to them (I dis¬
cover) is that they are all untrue. If you leave
off looking at books about beasts and men, if
you begin to look at beasts and men then (if
you have any humour or imagination, any
sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will
observe that the startling thing is not how like
man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It
is the monstrous scale of his divergence that
requires an explanation. That man and brute
are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being
so like they should then be so insanely unlike,
that is the shock and the enigma. That an
ape has hands is far less interesting to the
philosopher than the fact that having hands
he does next to nothing with them; does not
play knuckle-bones or the violin ; does not
carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of
barbaric architecture and debased art. But
elephants do not build colossal temples of

Authority and the Adventurer

ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not
paint even bad pictures, though equipped with
the material of many camel’s-hair brushes.
Certain modern dreamers say that ants and
bees have a society superior to ours. They
have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth
only reminds us that it is an inferior civiliza¬
tion. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated
with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has
seen a bee-hive carved with the images of
gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm be¬
tween man and other creatures may have a
natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We
talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild
animal. It is man that has broken out. All
other animals are tame animals; following the
rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All
other animals are domestic animals; man alone
is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a
monk. So that this first superficial reason for
materialism is, if anything, a reason for its
opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off
that all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the
second of the three chance rationalist argu¬
ments; the argument that all that we call divine
began in some darkness and terror. When I
did attempt to examine the foundations of this

267

Orthodoxy

modern idea I simply found that there were
none. Science knows nothing whatever about
pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that
he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to
conjecture that such things as human sacrifice
were once innocent and general and that they
gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evi¬
dence of it, and the small amount of indirect
evidence is very much the other way. In the
earliest legends we have, such as the tales of
Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not
introduced as something old, but rather as
something new ; as a strange and frightful excep¬
tion darkly demanded by the gods. History
says nothing; and legends all say that the earth
was kinder in its earliest time. There is no
tradition of progress; but the whole human
race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly
enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this
idea is used against its authenticity. Learned
men literally say that this pre-historic calamity
cannot be true because every race of mankind
remembers it. I cannot keep pace with these
paradoxes.

And if we took the third chance instance, it
would be the same ; the view that priests darken
and embitter the world. I look at the world
and simply discover that they don’t. Those

268

Authority and the Adventurer

countries in Europe which are still influenced
by priests, are exactly the countries where there
is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses
and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and
discipline may be walls; but they are the walls
of a playground. Christianity is the only frame
which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.
We might fancy some children playing on the
flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea.
So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s
edge they could fling themselves into every
frantic game and make the place the noisiest of
nurseries. But the walls were knocked down,
leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They
did not fall over; but when their friends re¬
turned to them they were all huddled in terror
in the centre of the island; and their song had
ceased.

Thus these three facts of experience, such
facts as go to make an agnostic, are, in this
view, turned totally round. I am left saying,
“Give me an explanation, first, of the towering
eccentricity of man among the brutes; second,
of the vast human tradition of some ancient
happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of
such pagan joy in the countries of the Catholic
Church.” One explanation, at any rate, covers
all three: the theory that twice was the natural

269

Orthodoxy

order interrupted by some explosion or revela¬
tion such as people now call “psychic.” Once
Heaven came upon the earth with a power or
seal called the image of God, whereby man took
command of Nature; and once again (when in
empire after empire men had been found want¬
ing) Heaven came to save mankind in the
awful shape of a man. This would explain
why the mass of men always look backwards;
and why the only corner where they in any
sense look forwards is the little continent where
Christ has His Church. I know it will be said
that Japan has become progressive. But how
can this be an answer when even in saying
“Japan has become progressive,” we really
only mean, “Japan has become European”?
But I wish here not so much to insist on my
own explanation as to insist on my original
remark. I agree with the ordinary unbelieving
man in the street in being guided by three or
four odd facts all pointing to something; only
when I came to look at the facts I always found
they pointed to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such
ordinary anti-Christian arguments; if that be
too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of
the moment another. These are the kind of
thoughts which in combination create the im-

270

Authority arid the Adventurer

pression that Christianity is something weak
and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus
was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly,
a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second,
that Christianity arose and flourished in the
dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the
Church would drag us back; third, that the
people still strongly religious or (if you will)
superstitious — such people as the Irish — are
weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I
only mention these ideas to affirm the same
thing: that when I looked into them indepen¬
dently I found, not that the conclusions were
unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were
not facts. Instead of looking at books and
pictures about the New Testament I looked at
the New Testament. There I found an ac¬
count, not in the least of a person with his hair
parted in the middle or his hands clasped in
appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips
of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging
down tables, casting out devils, passing with
the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain
isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a
being who often acted like an angry god — and
always like a god. Christ had even a literary
style of his own, not to be found, I think, else¬
where; it consists of an almost furious use of

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Orthodoxy

the a fortiori. His “how much more” is piled
one upon another like castle upon castle in the
clouds. The diction used about Christ has
been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submis¬
sive. But the diction used by Christ is quite
curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leap¬
ing through needles and mountains hurled into
the sea. Morally it is equally terrific ; he called
himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to
buy swords if they sold their coats for them.
That he used other even wilder words on the
side of non-resistance greatly increases the
mystery; but it also, if anything, rather in¬
creases the violence. We cannot even explain
it by calling such a being insane; for insanity
is usually along one consistent channel. The
maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we
must remember the difficult definition of Chris¬
tianity already given; Christianity is a super¬
human paradox whereby two opposite passions
may blaze beside each other. The one ex¬
planation of the Gospel language that does
explain it, is that it is the survey of one who
from some supernatural height beholds some
more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered: the
idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages.
Here I did not satisfy myself with reading

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modern generalisations; I read a little history.
And in history I found that Christianity, so far
from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one
path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.
It was a shining bridge connecting two shining
civilizations. If any one says that the faith
arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is
simple : it didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean
civilization in the full summer of the Roman
Empire. The world was swarming with scep¬
tics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun,
when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast.
It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship
sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the
ship came up again: repainted and glittering,
with the cross still at the top. This is the
amazing thing the religion did: it turned a
sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived
under the load of waters; after being buried
under the debris of dynasties and clans, we
arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had
been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would
have followed fad in the twilight, and if the
civilization ever re-emerged (and many such
have never re-emerged) it would have been
under some new barbaric flag. But the Chris¬
tian Church was the last life of the old society
and was also the first life of the new. She

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Orthodoxy

took the people who were forgetting how to
make an arch and she taught them to invent
the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd
thing that could be said of the Church is the
thing we have all heard said of it. How can
we say that the Church wishes to bring us back
into the Dark Ages? The Church was the
only thing that ever brought us out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections
an idle instance taken from those who feel such
people as the Irish to be weakened or made
stagnant by superstition. I only added it
because this is a peculiar case of a statement of
fact that turns out to be a statement of false¬
hood. It is constantly said of the Irish that
they are impractical. But if we refrain for a
moment from looking at what is said about
them and look at what is done about them, we
shall see that the Irish are not only practical,
but quite painfully successful. The poverty of
their country, the minority of their members
are simply the conditions under which they
were asked to work; but no other group in
the British Empire has done so much with such
conditions. The Nationalists were the only
minority that ever succeeded in twisting the
whole British Parliament sharply out of its
path. The Irish peasants are the only poor

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men in these islands who have forced their
masters to disgorge. These people, whom we
call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will
not be squire-ridden. And when I came to
look at the actual Irish character, the case was
the same. Irishmen are best at the specially
hard professions — the trades of iron, the
lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases,
therefore, I came back to the same conclusion:
the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts,
only he had not looked at the facts. The
sceptic is too credulous; he believes in news¬
papers or even in encyclopaedias. Again the
three questions left me with three very antag¬
onistic questions. The average sceptic wanted
to know how I explained the namby-pamby
note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed
with mediaeval darkness and the political im¬
practicability of the Celtic Christians. But I
wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness
amounting to urgency, “What is this incom¬
parable energy which appears first in one
walking the earth like a living judgment and
this energy which can die with a dying civiliza¬
tion and yet force it to a resurrection from the
dead; this energy which last of all can inflame
a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in
justice that they get what they ask, while others

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Orthodoxy

go empty away; so that the most helpless island
of the Empire can actually help itself?”

There is an answer: it is an answer to say
that the energy is truly from outside the world ;
that it is psychic, or at least one of the results
of a real psychical disturbance. The highest
gratitude and respect are due to the great
human civilizations such as the old Egyptian
or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no
injustice for them to say that only modern
Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of
self-renewal recurring often at the shortest
intervals and descending to the smallest facts
of building or costume. All other societies die
finally and with dignity. We die daily. We
are always being born again with almost in¬
decent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that there is in historic Christendom a
sort of unnatural life : it could be explained as a
supernatural life. It could be explained as an
awful galvanic life working in what would have
been a corpse. For our civilization ought to
have died, by all parallels, by all sociological
probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of
Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our
estate : you and I have no business to be here at
all. We are all revenants; all living Christians
are dead pagans walking about. Just as

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Authority and the Adventurer

Europe was about to be gathered in silence to
Assyria and Babylon, something entered into
its body. And Europe has had a strange life
— it is not too much to say that it has had the
jumps — ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads
of doubt in order to convey the main conten¬
tion — that my own case for Christianity is
rational ; but it is not simple. It is an accumu¬
lation of varied facts, like the attitude of the
ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic
has got his facts all wrong. He is a non¬
believer for a multitude of reasons; but they
are untrue reasons. He doubts because the
Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren’t;
because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it
isn’t; because miracles do not happen, but they
do; because monks were lazy, but they were
very industrious; because nuns are unhappy,
but they are particularly cheerful ; because
Christian art was sad and pale, but it was
picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay
with gold; because modern science is moving
away from the supernatural, but it isn’t, it is
moving towards the supernatural with the
rapidity of a railway train.

But among these million facts all flowing one
way there is, of course, one question sufficiently

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Orthodoxy

solid and separate to be treated briefly, but by
itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the
supernatural. In another chapter I have in¬
dicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition
that the world must be impersonal because it is
orderly. A person is just as likely to desire
an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But
my own positive conviction that personal crea¬
tion is more conceivable than material fate, is,
I admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not
call it a faith or an intuition, for those words
are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly an
intellectual conviction ; but it is a primary intel¬
lectual conviction like the certainty of self of
the good of living. Any one who likes, there¬
fore, may call my belief in God merely mystical ;
the phrase is not worth fighting about. But
my belief that miracles have happened in
human history is not a mystical belief at all;
I believe in them upon human evidences as I
do in the discovery of America. Upon this
point there is a simple logical fact that only
requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow
or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that
the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly
and fairly, while believers in miracles accept
them only in connection with some dogma.
The fact is quite the other way. The believers

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Authority and the Adventurer

in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly)
because they have evidence for them. The
disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or
wrongly) because they have a doctrine against
them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is
to believe an old apple-woman when she bears
testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an
old apple-woman when she bears testimony to
a murder. The plain, popular course is to
trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly
as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the
landlord. Being a peasant he will probably
have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about
both. Still you could fill the British Museum
with evidence uttered by the peasant, and
given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to
human testimony there is a choking cataract
of human testimony in favour of the super¬
natural. If you reject it, you can only mean
one of two things. You reject the peasant’s
story about the ghost either because the man is
a peasant or because the story is a ghost story.
That is, you either deny the main principle of
democracy, or you affirm the main principle of
materialism — the abstract impossibility of mir¬
acle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in
that case you are the dogmatist. It is we
Christians who accept all actual evidence — it

279

Orthodoxy

is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence
being constrained to do so by your creed. But
I am not constrained by any creed in the mat¬
ter, and looking impartially into certain mir¬
acles of mediaeval and modern times, I have
come to the conclusion that they occurred.
All argument against these plain facts is always
argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval
documents attest certain miracles as much as
they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But
mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to
know in what they were superstitious, the only
ultimate answer is that they believed in the
miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I
am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If
I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is
— that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible
because only stupid sailors have seen it; and
the sailors are only stupid because they say
they have seen Iceland. It is only fair to add
that there is another argument that the unbe¬
liever may rationally use against miracles,
though he himself generally forgets to use it.

He may say that there has been in many
miraculous stories a notion of spiritual prep¬
aration and acceptance: in short, that the
miracle could only come to him who believed
in it. It may be so, and if it is so how are we

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Authority and the Adventurer

to test it ? If we are inquiring whether certain
results follow faith, it is useless to repeat wearily
that (if they happen) they do follow faith. If
faith is one of the conditions, those without
faith have a most healthy right to laugh. But
they have no right to judge. Being a believer
may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk;
still if we were extracting psychological facts
from drunkards, it would be absurd to be
always taunting them with having been drunk.
Suppose we were investigating whether angry
men really saw a red mist before their eyes.
Suppose sixty excellent householders swore that
when angry they had seen this crimson cloud:
surely it would be absurd to answer “Oh, but
you admit you were angry at the time.” They
might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus),
“How the blazes could we discover, without
being angry, whether angry people see red?”
So the saints and ascetics might rationally
reply, “Suppose that the question is whether
believers can see visions — even then, if you
are interested in visions it is no point to object
to believers.” You are still arguing in a circle
— in that old mad circle with which this book
began.

The question of whether miracles ever occur
is a question of common sense and of ordinary

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Orthodoxy

historical imagination: not of any final physical
experiment. One may here surely dismiss that
quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks
about the need for “scientific conditions” in
connection with alleged spiritual phenomena.
If we are asking whether a dead soul can com¬
municate with a living it is ludicrous to insist
that it shall be under conditions in which no
two living souls in their senses would seriously
communicate with each other. The fact that
ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the
existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers
prefer darkness disproves the existence of love.
If you choose to say, “I will believe that Miss
Brown called her fianc6 a periwinkle or, any
other endearing term, if she will repeat the
word before seventeen psychologists,” then I
shall reply, “Very well, if those are your con¬
ditions, you will never get the truth, for she
certainly will not say it.” It is just as un¬
scientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised
that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain
extraordinary sympathies do not arise. It is
as if I said that I could not tell if there was a
fog because the air was not clear enough ; or as
if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a
solar eclipse.

As a common-sense conclusion, such as those

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Authority and the Adventurer

to which we come about sex or about midnight
(well knowing that many details must in their
own nature be concealed) I conclude that mir¬
acles do happen. I am forced to it by a con¬
spiracy of facts: the fact that the men who
encounter elves or angels are not the mystics
and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farm¬
ers, and all men at once coarse and cautious;
the fact that we all know men who testify to
spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists,
the fact that science itself admits such things
more and more every day. Science will even
admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation,
and will very likely admit the Resurrection
when it has thought of another word for it.
I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the strong¬
est of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that
these supernatural things are never denied
except on the basis either of anti-^democracy or
of materialist dogmatism — I may say ma¬
terialist mysticism. The sceptic always takes
one of the two positions; either an ordinary
man need not be believed, or an extraordinary
event must not be believed. For I hope we
may dismiss the argument against wonders
attempted in the mere recapitulation of frauds,
of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That
is not an argument at all, good or bad. A false

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Orthodoxy

ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as
much as a forged banknote disproves the
existence of the Bank of England — if anything,
it proves its existence.

Given this conviction that the spiritual
phenomena do occur (my evidence for which
is complex but rational), we then collide with
one of the worst mental evils of the age. The
greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was
this: that men began to use the word “spiritual”
as the same as the word “good.” They thought
that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality
was to grow in virtue. When scientific evolu¬
tion was announced, some feared that it would
encourage mere animality. It did worse: it
encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men
to think that so long as they were passing from
the ape they were going to the angel. But you
can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A
man of genius, very typical of that time of
bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benja¬
min Disraeli was right when he said he was on
the side of the angels. He was indeed; he was
on the side of the fallen angels. He was not
on the side of any mere appetite or animal
brutality; but he was on the side of all the im¬
perialism of the princes of the abyss ; he was on
the side of arrogance and mystery, and con-

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tempt of all obvious good. Between this
sunken pride and the towering humilities of
heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of
shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them,
must make much the same mistakes that he
makes in encountering any other varied types
in any other distant continent. It must be
hard at first to know who is supreme and who
is subordinate. If a shade arose from the
under world, and stared at Piccadilly, that
shade would not quite understand the idea of
an ordinary closed carriage. He would sup¬
pose that the coachman on the box was a tri¬
umphant conqueror, dragging behind him a
kicking and imprisoned captive. So, if we see
spiritual facts for the first time, we may mis¬
take who is uppermost. It is not enough to
find the gods; they are obvious; we must find
God, the real chief of the gods. We must have
a long historic experience in supernatural
phenomena — in order to discover which are
really natural. In this light I find the history
of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,
quite practical and clear. It does not trouble
me to be told that the Hebrew god was one
among many. I know he was, without any
research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal
looked equally important, just as the sun and

285

Orthodoxy

the moon looked the same size. It is only
slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasur¬
ably our master, and the small moon only our
satellite. Believing that there is a world of
spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world of
men, looking for the thing that I like and think
good. Just as I should seek in a desert for
clean water, or toil at the North Pole to make a
comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of
void and vision until I find something fresh
like water, and comforting like fire ; until I find
some place in eternity, where I am literally at
home. And there is only one such place to be
found.

I have now said enough to show (to any one
to whom such an explanation is essential) that
I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a
ground of belief. In pure records of experi¬
ment (if these be taken democratically without
contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that
miracles happen, and second that the nobler
miracles belong to our tradition. But I will
not pretend that this curt discussion is my real
reason for accepting Christianity instead of
taking the moral good of Christianity as I
should take it out of Confucianism.

I have another far more solid and central
ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead

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Authority and the Adventurer

of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme.
And that is this: that the Christian Church in
its practical relation to my soul is a living
teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly
taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly
teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly
the meaning of the shape of the cross; some
day I may see suddenly the meaning of the
shape of the mitre. One fine morning I saw
why windows were pointed; some fine morning
I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has
told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakes¬
peare has startled you with an image ; but
Shakespeare will not startle you with any
more. But imagine what it would be to live
with such men still living, to know that Plato
might break out with an original lecture to¬
morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare
might shatter everything with a single song.
The man who lives in contact with what he
believes to be a living Church is a man always
expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to¬
morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting
to see some truth that he has never seen before.
There is one only other parallel to this posi¬
tion; and that is the parallel of the life in which
we all began. When your father told you,
walking about the garden, that bees stung or

287

Orthodoxy

that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking
the best out of his philosophy. When the bees
stung you, you did not call it an entertaining
coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you
did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric
symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the
deep delicate truths that flowers smell.” No:
you believed your father, because you had
found him to be a living fountain of facts, a
thing that really knew more than you; a thing
that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as
to-day. And if this was true of your father,
it was even truer of your mother ; at least it was
true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated.
Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss
about the subjection of women, will no one say
how much every man owes to the tyranny and
privilege of women, to the fact that they alone
rule education until education becomes futile:
for a boy is only sent to be taught at school
when it is too late to teach him anything. The
real thing has been done already, and thank
God it is nearly always done by women. Every
man is womanised, merely by being born.
They talk of the masculine woman; but every
man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk
to Westminster to protest against this female
privilege, I shall not join their procession.

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Authority and the Adventurer

For I remember with certainty this fixed
psychological fact; that the very time when I
was most under a woman’s authority, I was
most full of flame and adventure. Exactly
because when my mother said that ants bit
they did bite, and because snow did come in
winter (as she said); therefore the whole world
was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments,
and it was like living in some Hebraic age,
when prophecy after prophecy came true. I
went out as a child into the garden, and it was
a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a
clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not
have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmean¬
ing wilderness is not even impressive. But the
garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly
because everything had a fixed meaning which
could be found out in its turn. Inch by inch
I might discover what was the object of the
ugly shape called a rake ; or form some shadowy
conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat.

So, since I have accepted Christendom as a
mother and not merely as a chance example,
I have found Europe and the world once more
like the little garden where I stared at the
symbolic shapes of cat and rake ; I look at every¬
thing with the old elvish ignorance and ex¬
pectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may

289

Orthodoxy

look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but
I have found by experience that such things end
somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman
may be apparently *as useless as a cat, but he
is also as fascinating, for there must be some
strange reason for his existence. I give one
instance out of a hundred; I have not myself
any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm
for physical virginity, which has certainly been
a note of historic Christianity. But when I
look not at myself but at the world, I perceive
that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Chris¬
tianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high
human nature in many spheres. The Greeks
felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the
Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst
and wildest of the great Elizabethan play¬
wrights clung to the literal purity of a woman
as to the central pillar of the world. Above
all, the modern world (even while mocking
sexual innocence) has flung itself into a gen¬
erous idolatry of sexual innocence — the great
modern worship of children. For any man
who loves children will agree that their peculiar
beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With
all this human experience, allied with the Chris¬
tian authority, I simply conclude that I am
wrong, and the church right; or rather that I

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Authority and the Adventurer

am defective, while the church is universal.
It takes all sorts to make a church; she does
not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I
have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept
like the fact that I have no ear for music. The
best human experience is against me, as it
is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one
flower in my father’s garden, of which I have
not been told the sweet or terrible name. But
I may be told it any day.

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason
for accepting the religion and not merely the
scattered and secular truths out of the religion.
I do it because the thing has not merely told
this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself
as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies
say the things that plainly seem to be true;
only this philosophy has again and again said
the thing that does not seem to be true, but is
true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing
where it is not attractive; it turns out to be
right, like my father in the garden. Theo-
sophists for instance will preach an obviously
attractive idea like re-incamation ; but if we
wait for its logical results, they are spiritual
superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For
if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins,
people will tend to despise the beggar. But

291

Orthodoxy

Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive
idea, such as original sin; but when we wait
for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood,
and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only
with original sin we can at once pity the beggar
and distrust the king. Men of science offer
us health, an obvious benefit; it is only after¬
wards that we discover that by health, they
mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden
brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we
realise that jumping was an athletic exercise
highly beneficial to our health. It is only
afterwards that we realise that this danger is
the root of all drama and romance. The
strongest argument for the divine grace is
simply its ungraciousness. The unpopular
parts of Christianity turn out when examined
to be the very props of the people. The outer
ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical
abnegations and professional priests; but inside
that inhuman guard you will find the old human
life dancing like children, and drinking wine
like men; for Christianity is the only frame
for pagan freedom. But in the modern philo¬
sophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring
that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its
despair is within.

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Authority and the Adventurer

And its despair is this, that it does not really
believe that there is any meaning in the uni¬
verse; therefore it cannot hope to find any
romance; its romances will have no plots. A
man cannot expect any adventures in the land
of anarchy. But a man can expect any number
of adventures it he goes travelling in the land of
authority. One can find no meanings in a
jungle of scepticism; but the man will find
more and more meanings who walks through
a forest of doctrine and design. Here every¬
thing has a story tied to its tail, like the tools
or pictures in my father’s house; for it is my
father’s house. I end where I began — at the
right end. I have entered at least the gate
of all good philosophy. I have come into my
second childhood.

But this larger and more adventurous Chris¬
tian universe has one final mark difficult to
express ; yet as a conclusion of the whole matter
I will attempt to express it. All the real argu¬
ment about religion turns on the question of
whether a man who was born upside down can
tell when he comes right way up. The primary
paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary
condition of man is not his sane or sensible
condition; that the normal itself is an abnor¬
mality. That is the inmost philosophy of the

293

Orthodoxy

Fall. In Sir Oliver Lodge’s interesting new
Catechism, the first two questions were: “What
are you?” and “What, then, is the meaning
of the Fall of Man?” I remember amusing
myself by writing my own answers to the ques¬
tions; but I soon found that they were very
broken and agnostic answers. To the ques¬
tion, “What are you?” I could only answer,
“God knows.” And to the question, “What
is meant by the Fall?” I could answer with
complete sincerity, “That whatever I am, lam
not myself.” This is the prime paradox of our
religion; something that we have never in any
full sense known, is not only better than our¬
selves, but even more natural to us than our¬
selves. And there is really no test of this
except the merely experimental one with which
these pages began, the test of the padded cell
and the open door. It is only since I have
known orthodoxy that I have known mental
emancipation. But, in conclusion, it has one
special application to the ultimate idea of joy.

It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy
and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as
easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and
Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean
nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human
must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only

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matter of interest is the manner in which the
two things are balanced or divided. And the
really interesting thing is this, that the pagan
was (in the main) happier and happier as he
approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as
he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the
best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus
or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never
to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But
it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about
its origin. To the pagan the small things are
as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of
the mountain ; but the broad things are as bitter
as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very
core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind
the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates,
who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse
than deadly ; they are dead. And when rational¬
ists say that the ancient world was more en¬
lightened than the Christian, from their point
of view they are right. For when they say
“enlightened” they mean darkened with incu¬
rable despair. It is profoundly true that the
ancient world was more modern than the
Christian. The common bond is in the fact
that ancients and moderns have both been
miserable about existence, about everything,
while mediaevals were happy about that at

295

Orthodoxy

least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the
moderns, were only miserable about everything
— they were quite jolly about everything else.
I concede that the Christians of the Middle
Ages were only at peace about everything — •
they were at war about everything else. But
if the question turn on the primary pivot of the
cosmos, then there was more cosmic content¬
ment in the narrow and bloody streets of
Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the
open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a
gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a
gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay
about the little things, but sad about the big
ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma
defiantly) it is not native to man to be so.
Man is more himself, man is more manlike,
when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and
grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an
innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame
of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsa¬
tion of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emo¬
tional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour
by which all things live. Yet, according to
the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan
or the agnostic, this primary need of human
nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to

296

Authority and the Adventurer

be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be
contracted, it must cling to one corner of the
world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but
for the agnostic its desolation is spread through
an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call
being born upside down. The sceptic may
truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are
dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his
brain is in the abyss. To the modem man the
heavens are actually below the earth. The
explanation is simple; he is standing on his
head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand
on. But when he has found his feet again he
knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and
perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the
right way up; satisfies it supremely in this;
that by its creed joy becomes something gigan¬
tic and sadness something special and small.
The vault above us is not deaf because the
universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heart¬
less silence of an endless and aimless world.
Rather the silence around us is a small and
pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a
sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy
as a sort of merciful comedy : because the frantic
energy of divine things would knock us down
like a drunken farce. We can take our own
tears more lightly than we could take the tre-

297

Orthodoxy

mendous levities of the angels. So we sit
perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while
the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us
to hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the
pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.
And as I close this chaotic volume I open again
the strange small book from which all Chris¬
tianity came; and I am again haunted by a
kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure
which fills the Gospels towers in this respect,
as in every other, above all the thinkers who
ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was
natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient
and modern, were proud of concealing their
tears. He never concealed His tears; He
showed them plainly on His open face at any
daily sight, such as the far sight of His native
city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn
supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud
of restraining their anger. He never restrained
His anger. He flung furniture down the front
steps of the Temple, and asked men how they
expected to escape the damnation of Hell.
Yet He restrained something. I say it with
reverence; there was in that shattering person¬
ality a thread that must be called shyness.
There was something that He hid from all men

298

Authority and the Adventurer

when He went up a mountain to pray. There
was something that He covered constantly by
abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There
was some one thing that was too great for God
to show us when He walked upon our earth;
and I have sometimes fancied that it was His
mirth.

299

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